


In Deep

by Rhianne



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Angst, Gen, Gen Fic, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-04
Updated: 2012-06-04
Packaged: 2017-11-06 20:08:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/422713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhianne/pseuds/Rhianne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Blair is kidnapped by a gang of thieves, Jim finds himself unable to rush to his rescue - because he's already undercover as part of the same gang.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Deep

Jim silently made his way back from the Rainier University Library, two heavy books in his pack. Tate had given him the names and locations of the books that had been locked away in the library’s special collections room, and it had taken Jim less than three minutes to get in, find the books he’d been sent to steal and get out again. 

Johnson had come with him, but Jim had no idea why. Not that this was the first time members of the group had been sent out with little or no knowledge of what the others were doing. Whatever they were being paid to gather together, the man at the top was being cautious to the point of paranoia.

Jim had a grudging respect for anyone cautious enough to be able to work like that. It made it a hundred times harder for anyone on the outside to figure out what they were up to, and even Jim, working on the inside with his senses as a distinct advantage, hadn’t yet been able to work out what the end result was going to be.

Being ordered to steal books from the university was unexpected even for Jim, though, and Jim had no idea what was so important about these particular tomes. 

Johnson had refused to come into the library with him, saying that he had a package of his own to collect from Rainier. He’d taken advantage of Johnson staying behind to leave a note for Simon hidden in the place he’d taken the books, with a brief update on his actions, the names of the titles he’d taken and a suggestion that Simon go to Sandburg, in case he had any idea what was so special about these things. 

It had to have something to do with their break-in at the museum two nights before, but as yet Jim couldn’t figure out what.

They’d parked across the other side of the university, making it highly unlikely that anyone would immediately connect their van with the break-in at the library. Jim’s own skills meant he could slip across the campus unseen by human eyes or surveillance cameras.

They had, in fact, parked just along from Hargrove Hall, and Jim had already noted the irony of that as he’d automatically searched for Sandburg’s car as they drove in, relieved when he hadn’t seen it in its usual spot along from the fountain.

These people were dangerous, and he didn’t want Sandburg anywhere near them, not even by accident.

As he reached the corner of Hargrove Hall, the van came back into his sights and Jim’s heart sank. 

There was a Corvair parked across from Johnson’s van.

Sandburg’s Corvair.

Shit.

Jim took a second to wonder why he was even remotely surprised at that given their usual run of luck before the sound of flesh hitting flesh suddenly assaulted his ears. Jim increased his speed as he rounded the corner of the van to see Johnson’s black clad figure pinning someone up against the side of the van, his hand tight around their throat as he punched them hard in the face before letting go, sending his victim to the ground. 

Correction – sending _Sandburg_ to the ground.

Johnson sent a vicious kick into Sandburg’s ribs, eliciting a cry of pain from Sandburg that sent a wave of rage through Jim.

Before he’d even registered his actions Jim was running, racing across the few feet that separated them and hauling Johnson away from Blair.

“Hey!” Johnson cried out, taken by surprise as Jim spun him round and lashed out with all his anger, his single punch knocking Johnson down.

He dropped to his knees beside Sandburg who was crumpled on the sidewalk, one hand curled protectively over his ribs.

“Chief?” he asked gently, and Sandburg groaned, pain and confusion written across his face as his eyes began to flicker behind broken glasses. 

“What in the hell are you doing?” Johnson’s furious voice came behind him, and Jim shot to his feet, positioning himself protectively between Johnson and Sandburg. “Have you gone crazy?”

“What do you think you’re playing at?” Jim growled in return, uncomfortably aware that behind him Sandburg had, as yet, made no attempt to get up.

“I’m doing my job!” Johnson yelled back, pushing Ellison away as he stalked over to him. “Tate wants him!”

Those three simple words stopped Jim in his tracks. “What!”

“ _He’s_ the package I was sent to collect,” Johnson hissed. “We need someone to authenticate the artifacts after the fuck up on Tuesday night. Tate says that this guy knows about this stuff.”

It was like a bucket of ice-cold water had been thrown over Jim’s head, and he couldn’t stop the horror from showing on his face. What the hell was he going to do now?

He couldn’t let these people get their hands on Sandburg. They were killers; cold-hearted, vicious killers with links to organized crime and a string of bombings all across Washington State. There was no way that they were going to let Sandburg live after he’d done whatever they wanted. 

Sandburg was a civilian, not a cop, and Jim was sworn to serve and protect the public. Not to mention his almost instinctive need to keep Sandburg safe above everything else.

But on the other hand, this group had killed hundreds of people and their crimes were continuing to escalate. Jim had spent weeks undercover before he’d finally managed to infiltrate them, and this was the closest the authorities had got to them in years.

He could break his cover and arrest Johnson right now, but the man wouldn’t tell them anything, and all that the department would be able to do would be to arrest Tate and the others for breaking into the museum.

They’d all be out on bail in less than a week.

That might delay the bombers for a week or two, but they’d get the money they needed from somewhere else, and god knows how many people would die when the next bomb went off. Not to mention the one after that.

And who was to say, if he arrested Johnson now, that whoever was giving Tate his orders wouldn’t try to kidnap Sandburg anyway? 

Straightening, Johnson moved as if to step round Jim, heading in Sandburg’s direction and Jim instinctively blocked his path. But even as he did so, pushing Johnson back and keeping him away from Sandburg, he knew what his decision had to be.

“Don’t,” he warned, but this time Johnson pushed him in return, sending him staggering backwards a few steps. Jim recovered quickly, but that short delay was all the time that Johnson needed. He pulled a gun from inside his jacket, aiming it directly at Jim’s chest. 

“What is the matter with you?” he asked furiously. “We need him!”

“Not like this,” Jim retorted, thinking desperately. He himself was unarmed, and couldn’t try to take the gun from Johnson. There was too much of a risk that he’d be the one who was shot, leaving Sandburg unprotected and in Johnson’s hands. 

No. Crazy as it was, playing along for now was the safest thing to do. At least if Jim was still working with the gang, he’d be in the best position to protect Sandburg.

If this had to happen, _he_ was going to be the one to do it, and it would be as gentle as he could possibly make it. Johnson was a sadistic son of a bitch at the best of times, and Jim would be damned if he was going to let him hit his partner again. He gestured angrily to where Blair was now struggling slowly to his knees. “He’ll be no use to us if you break his fucking jaw!” Jim pointed to the stolen books, which were scattered on the sidewalk where he’d dropped them in his rush to Sandburg’s defense. “Get the books. I’ll deal with him.”

Johnson watched him thoughtfully for a few seconds, and Jim held his breath, praying that Johnson would fall for the act. Finally, Johnson shrugged sullenly and turned away, holstering his gun and muttering under his breath about not having signed up to work with nutcases.

With a heavy heart Jim turned back to Blair, still not quite believing what he was about to do. But he also knew that he didn’t have a choice here.

Sandburg had one hand braced against the side of the van as he hauled himself up, but Jim could see just how dazed he was, a thin trail of blood trickling down the side of his face from a cut just above his left eye.

It didn’t take much effort for Jim to move up behind his partner, turning him deftly around and wrapping one arm around Sandburg’s neck. Blair swayed in his grip, bringing both hands up to grasp Jim’s arm, trying to loosen his attacker’s hold even though Jim was making sure he was only applying enough pressure to hold him in place, and not constricting Sandburg’s breathing in any way.

“Get off me!” Sandburg gasped out as he struggled; kicking back and digging his hands into Jim’s arm, trying anything he could think of to get away. As Jim placed his free hand over Sandburg’s mouth so that he couldn’t shout for help, he was ridiculously proud of his partner for refusing to capitulate.

Johnson was already on his way back over to them both, and Jim knew that he didn’t have much time. This had already gone on far too long, and they all needed to get out of here before someone noticed what was happening and called the campus security. It might be gone midnight, but Sandburg wasn’t the only one who could regularly be found working at Rainier all hours of the day and night.

“Need a hand?” Johnson asked smugly, and Jim shook his head, trying to shift his grip on Sandburg. Years in covert ops had taught him dozens of ways to subdue an opponent, some violent and some not, and so Ellison knew exactly how to knock Sandburg out without causing him any pain.

There were points all over the body that, when pressure was applied, would render the victim unconscious in seconds, and Jim knew exactly where they all were. It wasn’t an ability he was particularly proud of.

But Johnson was getting closer, and Sandburg was fighting him hard enough that he couldn’t get a firm grip on the pressure point long enough to do what he had to.

Cursing, hating that he was going to have to play on Sandburg’s trust of him, he bent his head down close to Blair’s ear.

“Easy, chief,” he said and Blair froze, twisting his head back in surprise as he recognized the voice, trying to see behind the balaclava that Jim was wearing. That was all the opportunity Jim needed and he quickly tightened his grip, pressing down hard on the pressure point located where Sandburg’s neck and shoulder muscles met. Blair gasped behind Jim’s hand, and seconds later his eyes rolled back in his head and Sandburg slumped unconscious into Jim’s arms.

Easing Sandburg gently down onto the cold ground, Ellison had never in his life hated himself quite as much as he did at that moment. 

 

~*~*~

 

Ellison’s own heart was pounding as he released Blair and reached up to open the back door of the van, ready to lift Sandburg inside.

“Here,” Johnson called over, and Jim glanced up just in time to see Johnson throw something – no, two things – towards him. He caught them instinctively, looking down to find himself holding a pair of metal handcuffs and a piece of cloth.

Jim hesitated, but Johnson saw his uncertainty for what it was almost immediately and stepped forward.

“What are you waiting for?” he asked warily, his hand reaching into his jacket to rest menacingly on the gun nestled to his side. “We don’t want him making any trouble.”

Resigned to his fate, Ellison sighed. “Relax, will you?” he snapped, rolling Sandburg onto his side as carefully as he could before cuffing his partner’s hands behind his back.

A blindfold was next, and Jim gritted his teeth as he covered Blair’s eyes with the cloth. Once that was done, Jim shifted his stance before lifting Sandburg from the ground, straining to take his partner’s weight. 

Christ, Sandburg was heavier than Ellison had expected, but he refrained from asking for Johnson’s help. The guy wasn’t getting any closer to Sandburg than was absolutely necessary.

“You drive,” he ground out as he covered the mercifully few steps to the van before placing Sandburg inside and rolling him away from the doors. He straightened then, turning back to make sure that Johnson was heading for the driver’s seat before stepping into the van himself and closing the doors behind him. 

The van was pitch-black, the meager streetlight failing to break through the darkened windows, but Ellison dialed up his sight and, once the engine had roared to life and Johnson was safely occupied, turned his full attention to Sandburg.

He hadn’t moved at all, still sprawled on the floor of the van where Jim had placed him. For one horrifying second Ellison thought he might have pushed too hard on the pressure point. There was a fine line between maintaining the pressure long enough to knock someone out and holding on that little bit too long, cutting off the airway and causing death. But Ellison was well trained, and he knew Sandburg was still breathing. Jim could see his chest rising and falling, and could hear the air filling his lungs as the van drove quickly away from university grounds. He was breathing deeply and even and Jim focused in on the sound, needing to know the instant that Sandburg started to wake up. 

Even though Johnson was in the front of the van there was still a chance that he’d be able to overhear any conversation that they had, so Ellison couldn’t risk openly explaining to Sandburg what was happening, but he couldn’t guarantee that his friend would remember the seconds before he’d passed out, and he had to find a way to let Sandburg know that he was here, watching over him.

Sitting down next to Sandburg’s body and checking the cuffs to make sure they weren’t too tight, Ellison waited impatiently for Sandburg to wake up, wondering how the hell they were both going to get out of this in one piece, and just how on earth it had all gone so wrong.

 

~*~*~

 

**_~ Three Weeks Earlier ~_ **

“Simon, I don’t like this,” Blair said, glancing worriedly at Jim as he did so. “Jim’s going to be completely without backup – it’s not safe. What if they blow his cover? What if…”

Jim cut in, interrupting Sandburg before he could begin to work himself up into a frenzy. “Relax, chief,” he said with an amused smile. “I’ve done this before. I’ll be fine.”

“You don’t know that, Jim,” Sandburg snapped back, rising from his chair and pacing up and down in front of Simon’s desk. “I mean, what if something happens with your senses? If you’re not checking in regularly it could be days before we even know that anything’s wrong!”

“Sandburg!” Simon interrupted as Blair paused for breath, cutting across the anthropologist before he could continue. “Ellison will check in when he can, and we’ll have men keeping watch on the people that Tate’s group is known to deal with.”

“But Simon…” 

“Jim is a good detective,” Simon insisted. “He doesn’t need you watching his back all the time! The decision has been made.”

Sandburg subsided at that, glancing uncertainly at Jim before sitting back down with a sigh, a deep frown across his face.

Inwardly wincing at the unintentionally harsh tone to Simon’s words, Jim leaned across and clapped Blair on the shoulder, smiling at him briefly in an attempt to take the sting out of what Simon had said. “I won’t be completely out of touch with you at first. It’ll take me a while to make contact with Tate and get him to trust me enough to let me into the group. I’ll check in with both you and Simon as often as I can until that happens. Once I’m part of the group I’ll have to be much more careful, but we should be on the home straight by then. I won’t be out of contact for very long.”

Sandburg didn’t reply, and as Jim took a mouthful of coffee, Simon watched Blair as if waiting for the next protest. When it didn’t come, he nodded in satisfaction and passed a folder over to Jim.

“Right, let’s go over this one last time. Jim?”

Jim opened the folder, flicking quickly through the paper until he pulled out the color photograph he was looking for and passed it over to Sandburg. “Raymond Tate,” he said by way of introduction. “He’s a professional thief; people hire him to steal specific objects. He’s been implicated in the theft of paintings, industrial secrets, blueprints, prototypes; basically he’ll steal anything that people are prepared to pay enough for. Over the years he’s been arrested almost a dozen times, we even managed to put him away once or twice, but only ever for petty theft, never anything really significant.”

Blair put on his glasses and examined the photo carefully before nodding and placing it on the edge of Simon’s desk. “So where do you fit in?”

“Three years ago, after he got out of prison the last time, he moved to Portland and dropped off the police radar. His parole officer thought he was finally going straight, but about six months ago there was a break-in at an art gallery in Portland. Three paintings were stolen, collectively worth almost a million. A security guard was killed in the raid, but before he died, the guard managed to give the police a description of the thief.”

“Tate?” Sandburg asked, and it was Simon who answered him, standing up and heading over to the coffee machine as he did so.

“No. The description didn’t match, and forensics placed another man at the scene, named Gordon Lee.” Simon offered both men a fresh cup of coffee, pouring them out before continuing. “Police arrested Lee for theft and murder, but when he was questioned he cut a deal and implicated Tate, saying that Tate had hired him to steal the painting, and that the guard’s death had been an accident.”

Blair frowned. “Why would a professional thief hire another thief to break into an art gallery? It doesn’t make sense – why wouldn’t Tate just do it himself?”

“That’s what the Portland PD wanted to know,” continued Jim, “but Lee supplied them with information that proved Tate was involved. According to him, Tate had grown tired of committing small crimes on his own and only pocketing a few thousand dollars at a time. He’d started agreeing to commit much more ambitious thefts, and was employing people who had skills he didn’t have to steal for him. So Lee turned state’s evidence, and Tate was arrested for conspiracy to commit theft and as an accessory to murder.”

“Then why isn’t he already in prison?”

“Because the case against Tate relied heavily on Lee’s testimony, and two weeks before the trial Lee was killed in a prison fight. The case against Tate collapsed. After that the Portland PD kept a real close eye on Tate, and four months ago he moved to Cascade. According to our sources he’s been gradually taking on bigger and bigger contracts, and with every job he gathers a new set of criminals to help him.”

“So that’s where Jim comes in, right?”

“Yes. It looks like Tate’s putting together a new group. We don’t know what he’s planning to steal yet, but the word on the street is that he’s looking for a safecracker, someone who can break through alarm systems. Ellison is going to go undercover. He’s played a safecracker before; with his senses it shouldn’t be a problem.”

Jim fished out two more photographs from the folder in his hand. The first one showed Raymond Tate sitting outside a coffee house with a blonde, bearded man wearing a long, black coat. “This is what makes it so important for me to do this. Tate was seen meeting with Neil Forrester three days ago here in Cascade.”

“Who’s he?”

“Neil Forrester is suspected of being a high-ranking member of the Reclaim America Front, a terrorist group that’s been setting off bombs all over Washington State.” Jim tapped the photograph for emphasis. “These guys make the Sunrise Patriots look like the Women’s Institute. If Tate is stealing something for Forrester, it might mean that they’re getting ready to start another bombing campaign, possibly even here in Cascade.”

“Oh, man,” Blair murmured, glancing up worriedly at Jim.

“If I can get Tate to hire me as a safecracker, then I might be able to get close to Forrester. Maybe even find out what they’re going to target next.”

 

~*~*~

 

It had all sounded so easy at the time. Go undercover, infiltrate a gang of thieves and get close enough to stop them and find out everything he could about Tate’s contact in the Reclaim America Front. The kind of thing he’d done a dozen times in his years on the force, and even more while working covert ops.

At first, it had worked like a charm. Two weeks of sneaking around, posing as 'Jim Tanner - master safecracker' had gone quickly. Jim had made himself known in the same bars and clubs that Tate and his girlfriend were known to frequent, and he and Simon had set up enough fake safecracking jobs to make it clear to anyone who was looking that Ellison was both good at what he did, and not particularly picky about who he worked for. 

No problem.

Ironically, getting caught up in a bar fight that unfortunately wasn’t staged had done as much for his street reputation as any of the jobs he’d pulled under cover of darkness, but Jim had been more than a match for the drunken idiot who’d confronted him, and now Jim Tanner was known as someone that you didn’t mess with.

That made him a perfect recruit for Tate, who needed people with muscle and no morals just as much as he needed people with particular skills.

After two weeks undercover contact had finally been made, and Jim had met a guy named Robert Johnson in a bar just a few blocks from the place he was renting. That meeting had been nothing but a way to check him out, and sentinel senses had easily picked out Raymond Tate discreetly sitting two tables away, listening in on their idle conversation for a while before he finally drained his beer and stood up, wandering over to where Ellison and Johnson were sitting and introducing himself.

One simple test of his safecracking abilities later, he was in and preparing to join the rest of Tate’s group in a break-in at the Cascade Museum. The break-in itself had worked like a charm, and even Ellison had to grudgingly admit that Tate had chosen his gang of thieves well. It was only after they’d made a clean getaway from the scene of the crime that things had started to go wrong.

Glancing down at Sandburg’s body, lying just a few inches away from where Jim himself was sitting with his back against one side of the van, he had to conclude that this sudden run of bad luck didn't look like it was going to end any time soon.

It was going to take at least another twenty minutes to get back to their base, even with no traffic on the road, and Jim couldn’t hold back his unease at what would happen when they got there. He still had no idea exactly what Tate wanted Sandburg for, and Jim knew that if he wanted to maintain his cover, there would only be so much he could do to protect Sandburg. 

A hard-assed, unfeeling criminal like Jim Tanner wouldn’t give two cents for the life of a college professor, and while Jim was quite prepared to sacrifice the entire operation if he had to, if Tate blew his cover before he was ready the gang would simply have two hostages to kill instead of one, and Jim couldn’t risk that happening. He was going to have to stay in character, playing along with whatever Tate was planning and hope that he could stave off any harm coming to Sandburg at the same time. 

This wasn’t going to be easy.

A soft moan caught Jim’s attention then, and he glanced down to Sandburg in time to see the man’s head move slightly, more than could be explained away by the awkward jerking of the van itself.

Jim automatically extended his senses and realized that Sandburg’s heart rate was rapidly increasing. 

Blair was starting to wake up.

 

~*~*~

 

A loud roar was the first thing Blair was aware of as he struggled back to consciousness. The noise was deafening, combining with the man hammering inside his head to create a symphony of noise and pain that he had no desire to hear.

He turned his head instinctively, trying to somehow get away from the noise but all that did was make the jackhammer step up a gear, and Blair winced as the pain increased, threatening to send him tumbling back into the abyss.

He hovered in that state between wakefulness and sleep for what seemed like forever, longing for sleep to return, but not quite being able to find it.

Gradually, as his mind began to clear and the pain changed from overwhelming to bearable, he finally managed to gather together enough of himself to try and work out what was happening.

It took a while, but he finally managed to identify the roar as the sound of an engine; the unmuffled, throaty sound and the way his entire body was being rocked telling him that wherever he was, he wasn’t in a normal car. And since he sure as hell wasn’t driving, he was being taken somewhere.

He shifted slightly, only then recognizing the metal cuffs that held his wrists behind him, and that it was cloth, not the headache, that was stopping him from opening his eyes.

He groaned then, still not quite conscious enough to realize that he should stay quiet, and he had to concentrate hard to try and think back to the last thing he could remember.

Then it came to him. Unable to sleep at home and sick of prowling anxiously around the loft wondering what Jim was doing and if he was alright, he had decided to head back to the university and catch up on some marking in spite of the late hour.

Blair had always worked better late at night, and the security guards no longer thought it strange to find him working at his desk long after the doors had been locked. Arranging access to the external doors of Hargrove Hall had been one of the first things he’d done on being assigned an office of his own.

It was surprising, actually, how often he’d met professors also working ridiculously late, and for all his good intentions of going to his office when the distractions of students weren’t there to take him away from his own work, quite often he’d end up talking with his colleagues about anything from the latest finds on some remote dig site to whatever scandal was rife at Rainier that week.

Tonight, he hadn’t even made it to the front door.

He’d pulled his backpack out of the Corvair and headed quickly across the street, passing quickly behind a large black van before someone had reached out and grabbed him, slamming him up against the side of the van. Blair had little time to notice anything more than the ominous black balaclava that his assailant was wearing before a fist had knocked him to the ground. 

He’d hit the back of his head against the van as he fell, and everything after that was just a series of vague, pain-filled impressions.

Hitting the ground.

Something hard slamming into his chest.

Indistinct voices shouting.

Hauling himself to his feet before being grabbed again.

Then a single voice before a strange feeling of…pressure…in his neck had sent him down into unconsciousness.

Jim’s voice.

Blair frowned at that, unable to work out how on earth he could have heard Jim’s voice and wondering if he had perhaps hit his head a little too hard, when he suddenly became aware of someone’s hand touching his arm.

He stiffened, swallowing nervously before speaking.

"Who’s there?" he asked, wishing his voice sounded stronger than it did, but the only response he got was two fingers pressing gently against his lips in a silent warning to be quiet. He nodded hesitantly, forcing himself to take deep, even breaths to keep himself calm until – thank God – the fingers were removed.

Listening intently, Blair was aware of a faint rustle of movement from somewhere beside him before a finger touched the back of his hand. The touch startled him and he jerked away but the finger simply moved with him, touching him in what felt worryingly like a caress, moving in light circles across his skin.

Blair’s breath caught in his throat, but as he forced himself to stay calm, fighting against his rising panic, he slowly realized that the finger wasn’t making circles – it was making _letters_. Three letters being spelled out against his skin over and over in a repeating pattern.

J. I. M.

_Jim._

He hadn’t been imagining things. Unbelievably, Jim _was_ here.

Shifting, Blair awkwardly moved his cuffed arms out far enough to twist round and reach for the hand of whoever had been touching him.

Praying that he was right and that he wasn’t about to make a big mistake, he felt blindly around him and after a few tries touched warm skin. He curled his fingers round what felt like the palm of a hand and squeezed once in acknowledgement before awkwardly spelling out two letters of his own against the floor of what must be the van he had seen.

O. K.

He waited, heart pounding in fear that he was wrong, that someone was trying to trick him, before a quiet chuckle finally allowed him to relax.

He’d know that laugh anywhere.

 

~*~*~

 

Blair’s sheer, blessed relief that Jim was here, fighting in his corner whatever the hell was going on, lasted for as long as it took for the van to arrive at its destination.

The second the engine was shut off and the muffled slam of a car door told Blair that the driver had got out, he tensed, the harsh reality of his situation pressing down on him once more.

The back door was pulled open and he was aware of someone stepping up into the van, which sank slightly under the extra weight.

“Get him up,” a guttural voice which definitely _wasn’t_ Jim said, and seconds later he was hauled up by a hand on each arm and dragged out of the van.

He hung helplessly between them for a few steps before he was able to get his feet under him, wincing as the strain pulled on his sore ribs.

Without a word he was pushed along, his fear rising with every step. Only the knowledge that Jim was there kept him relatively calm and compliant.

He could even tell what side Jim was walking on. There was someone holding his arms on either side, but while the grip on his right arm was bruisingly tight, pulling him along quickly with little regard for the fact that he couldn’t see where he was going, the hand on his left arm was much more gentle, doing nothing more than guiding his steps and steadying him when he stumbled. Instinctively he leaned closer to Jim, pulling away as much as he could from the much more frightening, unknown quantity to his right. 

Blair was half-expecting Jim to put a stop to this – for Simon to suddenly start shouting “Police! Freeze!” or _something_. Ironically, in spite of his fright at what was happening Blair would have been quite pleased if Simon and Jim had enough faith in him to trust his actions if they’d briefly needed a hostage that they could rely on not to endanger the operation. Surely Jim wasn’t really going to let anything happen to him?

Blair had to trust that Jim knew what he was doing. Right at this moment, he didn’t have any other choice.

But there was no shouting, no carefully staged last minute rescue, and as he was pushed through a doorway of some kind and his footsteps began echoing across a solid floor, Blair could hear more footsteps approaching him. Here were more people whose motives he couldn’t begin to imagine, and he could feel his nervousness flooding back. With no idea what Jim was expecting him to do, he did what he always did when he was nervous.

He talked.

“What’s going on?” he asked, pathetically proud of the steadiness in his voice as he glanced blindly around him. “Where am I?”

Jim’s hand tightened briefly on his arm as a voice that definitely wasn’t Jim’s answered him. “Relax, Professor. We’ve just got a little consulting work we want you to do.”

Blair frowned behind the blindfold. _Professor?_ He wasn’t a professor – was it possible that even with Jim here they’d somehow kidnapped the wrong person? Or perhaps Jim was expecting him to pretend to be someone else? If so, a little advanced warning would have been nice.

“I’m not a professor,” he protested nervously, trying unsuccessfully to pull himself out of their grasp. “I’m a grad student. Look, I think you’ve made a mistake…”

Blair was aware of Jim tensing up next to him, the slight movement carrying down into the fingers wrapped around his arm, and the realization that Jim was nervous did nothing to ease his own fears.

“We know exactly who you are, Mr Sandburg,” the voice continued, and Blair immediately stilled, head turning in the direction of the voice. “Relax, this will all be over soon.”

_That’s what I’m afraid of._

Then he was moving again, stumbling against Jim as they pushed him further into the building he was in. They crossed another threshold of some kind and the mass of footsteps instantly stopped echoing, the floor beneath his feet now feeling more like carpet than stone.

“In here,” someone muttered, and he was pulled sharply to the right.

“Look,” he tried again. “What’s going on? What do you people want?” This time his voice wasn’t nearly as calm, and he glanced blindly in Jim’s direction, hoping for reassurance, some kind of indication that everything was under control and that he had nothing to worry about.

None came, and Jim was worryingly silent.

In spite of what he thought he’d heard at Rainier, and the chuckle he knew he’d recognized inside the van, Blair began to wonder if Jim was even here at all. Could his mind have been playing tricks on him? The letters spelled out on his hand suggested otherwise, but realistically anyone could have done that – it didn’t have to be Jim. Had he simply imagined that he’d heard Jim’s laugh because of the letters he’d felt? Blair had taken enough psychology classes to know all about the power of suggestion, and he would be even more easily deceived now that he’d had one of his senses taken away.

Jim might not be here at all.

That thought alarmed him and he made himself take a deep breath, trying desperately to remain calm but it made no difference.

Then they stopped, and the grip on his arms tightened as someone fiddled with the cuffs on his wrists. Seconds later the metal dropped away and Blair breathed a little easier, easing his hands down to his sides. Maybe this was the end of it.

“Get him on the bed,” the voice said, and at those five ominous words, Blair panicked.

“No!” he shouted, twisting violently out of their grip. His sudden movement took them by surprise and he managed to get free for a moment, but without being able to see he only got a few steps away from his abductors before he knocked into something.

Then they were on him, and the force as someone slammed into him sent Blair tumbling to the ground, crying out as he landed painfully on his side.

What felt like dozens of hands descended, with people shouting all around him in a blur of angry voices, pulling him up off the floor before a fist to the face sent him down again.

The blow made his head spin and he lashed out in blind fear, twisting and cursing as he tried to keep them away but they pulled him up as if he was nothing, half-dragging, half-carrying him across the room.

“Relax chief, relax!” a voice broke above the din that sounded remarkably like Jim’s, but Blair was no longer in any fit state to either recognize the voice or to trust that his mind wasn’t tricking him again and he continued to fight, kicking out and finding a savage satisfaction in the agonized cry of pain as his foot connected with something soft and hopefully breakable.

It was all to no avail. However hard he fought there were just too many of them and it wasn’t long before he was pushed onto what felt like a mattress, his arms pulled above his head with such force that he couldn’t resist or risk the bones themselves being broken.

The metal reappeared at his wrists, and Blair heard the soft snick as the handcuffs were replaced. Then his arms were released and he tried to pull them down in front of him for some kind of protection, but the cuffs had been secured to something above his head and he couldn’t move them more than an inch or two.

Finally he stopped fighting, going still on the bed as his chest heaved from exertion and fear, and he was rewarded when the hands released him completely, people stepping away, he imagined in his mind’s eye, to hover menacingly around the bed.

Blair waited, his mind racing with possibilities of what might be about to happen, and more terrified than he could remember feeling since he’d woken up chained to a dentist’s chair in a candle-lit warehouse, staring into the eyes of a madman.

 

~*~*~

 

For Jim, having to physically help these people as they fought to tie Sandburg down was one of the hardest things he’d ever done, and it took every ounce of self-control he possessed not to lash out in furious rage each time Sandburg cried out in pain and fear.

After an eternity the torment was over, and Jim stood silently with everyone else as they looked down at Sandburg’s body lying prone on the bed. Every person in the room would be able to see the way that Sandburg’s chest was heaving as he fought against his panic, his hands twisting compulsively within the metal restraints, but only Jim could actually _hear_ the way his heart was racing, and see the minute tremors in his body that Sandburg was trying so hard to keep under control.

His need to reassure Sandburg that everything was alright was as instinctive as it was ridiculous, since things were so far from alright that Ellison couldn’t see any way out of this mess. As he curled his hands into tight fists, biting his lip to hold himself rigidly still, Ellison wondered why the hell he hadn’t simply put a stop to this at Rainier, arresting Johnson instead of letting the charade go this far. Oh, he still knew the logic behind his original reasoning; hundreds of people were going to die if they couldn’t put a stop to the bombers before they struck again, but somehow, standing here and watching impotently as these bastards terrified his partner, none of it seemed to matter all that much.

Then one of the gang; Graham Bell, a demolitions expert who was particularly friendly with Tate himself, broke away from the impromptu circle around the bed and moved angrily towards Sandburg, limping awkwardly every time he tried to put his weight on the leg Sandburg had kicked.

“You little shit!” he began, sinking a fist into Sandburg’s stomach. Blair grunted, his body automatically trying to curl around the pain until the cuffs pulled him back straight. Jim watched as Blair pulled in a shuddering breath, his entire body tensing in anticipation of another blow.

Bell seemed happy to oblige, hitting Sandburg again and that was the last straw - Jim couldn’t idly stand by and watch this, whatever the consequences. Bell raised his fist for the third time, but Jim stepped forward, catching Bell’s hand in his own before it could begin its descent.

“Knock it off,” Ellison snapped, noting with interest that Tate himself had stepped forward to stop Bell at the same time. Bell was so surprised by Jim’s actions that he didn’t move, simply standing there staring at Jim in surprise, his fist still encased in Jim’s.

It was Johnson who reacted first, stepping forward and shoving Jim in the chest, making him lose his grip on Bell’s hand. “Just what is your fucking problem?” he asked angrily. “First you get in the way at the university and now here? What’s the matter, you losing your nerve or something?”

“Back off,” Jim replied, taking a step towards Johnson and noting with satisfaction that the man immediately backed away from him. “We don’t have time for this.”

Jim was aware of Sandburg’s gasp at the sound of his voice, and he risked a glance over to his partner, seeing that he had instinctively turned his head towards the sound of Jim’s voice, even if he couldn’t see anything through the thick black fabric of the blindfold.

“There’s always time for a little payback,” Bell muttered sullenly, but he made no further move towards Sandburg and Jim rolled his eyes in frustration, looking over at Tate to try and work out what the man was thinking.

“There are more important things at stake here,” Jim continued angrily, allowing all of his rage to channel through his voice. “If I hadn’t stepped in at Rainier, you’d have broken this guy’s jaw! Look at him, what use is he going to be to us if he’s half dead?”

Tate nodded thoughtfully before stepping forward and clapping his hands together once, the sound echoing loudly through the room and making Sandburg flinch. “Okay, that’s enough,” he said. “We’re on a tight schedule; you’ve all got things to do.” A few seconds later and people started to file out of the small room, Johnson casting a final suspicious glance in Ellison’s direction before walking away. 

Tate turned brown eyes expectantly on Ellison, inclining his head as if motioning him to follow suit and leave with the others. Instead, Jim moved to stand next to Tate, beckoning him away from the bed and lowering his voice as if to ensure that Sandburg couldn’t hear what he was about to say. 

Even though Tate was so far behaving more reasonably towards Sandburg than any of the others, there was no way in hell Ellison was prepared to leave Blair alone with him. Now all he had to do was convince Tate that he should be the one to stay and guard Sandburg. Praying that he’d learned something about obfuscation from his quick-thinking partner in these last few years, Ellison took a deep breath and spoke.

“Thanks,” he began hesitantly and Tate nodded.

“What’s all this about Rainier?” he asked with a frown. “What happened?”

“I got back from the Museum to find Johnson laying into this guy and broke it up.”

Tate’s eyes narrowed, and he straightened his back as he looked at Ellison; a classically defensive posture that years of training had taught Jim to recognize. “Why would you do that?”

“I didn’t know you’d sent him to Rainier to get this guy,” Ellison protested. “I thought he’d just got into a fight with some student – the last thing we needed was for someone to call the cops and draw attention to us.”

Tate nodded slowly, glancing over to the bed and its prisoner before sighing. “What about just now?” he continued. “Johnson’s got a point – you seemed a bit too eager to stop Bell if you ask me.”

Jim grinned, the gesture belying the fact that his heart was racing. He was skating on seriously thin ice here – letting Tate think that he was keeping something important from him could destroy the whole case and put both Sandburg and himself in even more danger. “I wasn’t the only one who stepped forward,” he pointed out mildly, and Tate acknowledged that fact with the slightest of smiles. “You saw how mad Bell was, he wouldn’t have stopped until this guy was in pieces – how is he meant to help us if Bell beats him to death?”

Seeing the tension ease slightly out of Tate’s rigid shoulders, Jim carried on, moving the conversation on to his real agenda – getting some time alone with Sandburg so that he could update his partner on the situation and together, they could figure out what the hell they were going to do next. “Besides, we’re supposed to be delivering the goods to your buyer tomorrow night, right? If we have to wait hours for this guy to recover before we can get him to do his job, that doesn’t give us a lot of leeway in case something goes wrong. And there are better ways to get him to do what he’s told that don’t include brute force.”

Tate looked surprised at that. “What are you talking about?”

Jim grinned again, this time allowing a hint of the focused anger he felt to show through. “Simple,” he said, lowering his voice so that Sandburg couldn’t hear. “This guy’s terrified, anyone can see that. But if he’s stubborn, even that might not be enough to get him to cooperate. So we give him a friend. Someone he can latch on to, someone who’s nicer than the rest, who he thinks will ‘protect’ him.” 

Jim had to force the words past the catch in his throat. What he was saying was a bastardization of every aspect of his friendship with Sandburg – Blair _did_ rely on him to protect him, to take care of him in dangerous situations just as he relied on Sandburg to protect _him_ when his senses went crazy. Having to twist that reliance into a mockery of the bond they shared grated against everything Jim believed in, but he was simply going to have to hope that Sandburg understand how necessary this was, and that this was the best chance that Ellison had to keep them both safe. “Haven’t you heard of Stockholm syndrome? I’ve already helped him out once. I was the one who knocked him out at Rainier, but I didn’t hit him, and it was my voice that stopped Bell from laying into him just now. So let me guard him, and I’ll convince him to trust me, that I’ll make sure he gets out of this safely as long as he does what we want. Then, if he still doesn’t co-operate, we can keep brute force in reserve as another option. If we start with violence, there’s nowhere to go from there if he resists.”

Tate grinned back, and Ellison knew instantly that he had him. “I like it,” he said, nodding, with a glance over at Sandburg that could only be described as vindictive. “Who exactly are you, Tanner? None of this sounds like something a simple safecracker would know.”

Hearing the newfound respect underlying Tate’s words, Jim simply grinned. Let the man think what he liked. If Tate realized that Ellison was more formidable than he’d originally thought, and that made him listen more to Jim’s advice and maybe even defer to his opinions, even better. “Good cop/bad cop,” he quipped, “it doesn’t just work in the movies.”

“Fine,” Tanner said, raising his voice back up to normal levels. “You keep an eye on the Professor here, explain to him the facts of life. I’ve got a few calls to make, and then we’ll get on with things.”

With that Tate left the room, and Jim waited by the door for a moment to make sure that there was no-one else lurking around. When he was satisfied that no more surprise were in store in the immediate future, he finally allowed himself a deep sigh of relief. The key was in the outside lock and he removed it before shutting the door firmly, placing the key in the inside lock so that no-one could see through the keyhole. He stopped short of locking themselves in, though, not wanting to have to answer the suspicious questions that such an action would generate.

Only when he was finally satisfied that they were alone and safe for at least a few moments did he allow himself to turn to where Sandburg was lying.

His breathing had quieted down during Ellison’s conversation with Tate, and now Sandburg was completely still apart from the steady rise of his chest as he breathed. Nonetheless, Jim could see the tension that permeated every part of his body, muscles taut and his arms locked rigid where they were cuffed to the wrought iron bed frame.

Jim moved over to the bed, aware of Sandburg’s head moving slowly as his hearing tracked Jim’s quiet footsteps. As he looked down at the bruising that was already beginning to form around Sandburg’s jaw, and the thin trickle of drying blood from his split lip, Ellison wondered what the hell he was going to say to his partner that could possibly justify what he’d done.

 

~*~*~

 

The silence was almost as terrifying as the shouts of primal anger as they’d tied him down. At least when faced with their overpowering rage he’d known what he was dealing with, but this silent waiting was an unknown quantity, something he could neither identify or prepare for.

The fists that had rained down on him even after he was restrained and no longer a threat to them had been expected; Blair had found himself at the wrong end of a bully’s fists before, and in his experience they hardly ever followed the Marquis of Queensbury rules. Unfortunately, his head was still ringing from the assault, and enough of his body was protesting at the rough treatment that he’d been unable to focus well enough to make out what was being whispered just a few feet away from where he lay.

Blair recognized the sound of a door slamming that told him most of his tormentors were gone, and his desperate need to get free of his restraints was almost enough to get him moving again, fighting against the cuffs. But something – an instinctive knowledge perhaps, or a whisper of sound so quiet that Blair hadn’t even consciously identified it was enough to make him freeze rigidly in place.

He wasn’t alone.

Blair listened, tracking the presence as it crossed the room back towards him, fighting back the unhelpful suggestions his imagination was making about why he’d been chained to a bed and left in a room with just one person. About why, in fact, he’d been brought here in the first place.

Warm fingers touched his face and he started violently, not quite able to stop the frightened whimper from escaping through his lips before the blindfold was removed. There was a second’s delay as his eyes adjusted to the light before Blair registered the balaclava-clad man standing to one side of the bed. Blair looked up at his captor, nervously taking in the clear outline of a seriously muscled body beneath tight-fitting black clothes looming over him. This was not the kind of guy that Blair ever wanted to cross. 

“Are you okay?” The man’s voice was heavily muffled by the material covering his face.

Blair swallowed to try and ease his dry throat before speaking.

“Who are you?” he asked quietly, not really expecting an answer but needing to do something to break the ominous silence. The man’s eyes narrowed, but his back straightened as if he was surprised rather than annoyed, and Blair had the strangest impression that he’d seen that gesture somewhere before. Then, after the man reached up and removed the balaclava Blair realized why – he’d seen it every day for years; at the loft, the station, on stakeouts…

“Jim!” he exclaimed in shocked relief.

“Sorry chief, I forgot I was wearing this damn thing.” Jim tossed the balaclava onto the bed by his side.

“Thank God!” Blair continued, pulling once more against the handcuffs around his wrists. “Hurry up and get me out of these things!”

But instead of rushing forward with something useful, like a key, Jim simply sat down cautiously on the edge of the bed. “Sorry chief, I can’t risk it.”

“What? Jim, come on, I’m all for using handcuffs in bed, man, but this is not exactly what I had in mind, you know? For God’s sake, untie me!”

“I can’t!” Jim repeated, and the desperate edge to his voice stopped Blair in his tracks. Raising his head gingerly off the bed, Blair took his first good look at his friend. Jim was pale, the stubble on his face indicating it had been at least two days since he’d last shaved. A thin cut above his right eye matched the throbbing in Blair’s own temple, and everything about Jim’s body screamed out in tension. There were also the faintest signs of a bruise fading from underneath Jim’s left eye, as if the last remnants of a black eye was still stubbornly hanging around.

“What the hell is going on, Jim?” he hissed.

Jim leaned forward to look closely at the swollen marks on Blair’s face, taking Blair’s chin in his hand to get a better look. “I’m sorry about all this, Blair,” he said quietly. “I had no idea this was going to happen.”

“That _what_ was going to happen? Jim, will you please tell me what…” then he broke off, eyes widening as his memory kicked in. “That _was_ you at the university,” he accused Jim. “You were one of the men who knocked me out.” Blair couldn’t keep the shock of that realization from his voice and Jim flinched, but tellingly didn’t deny it. “What am I doing here?” he asked. “Who are these people?”

Jim lowered his voice uneasily and Blair cast an anxious glance at the doorway, expecting the rest of the group to burst in at any minute. “It’s Raymond Tate and the rest of the gang I was sent in to infiltrate,” he whispered. 

“What?” Blair exclaimed, his head reeling as he tried to make sense of this madness. “I tried for days to get you to let me come undercover with you; you told Simon you didn’t want me anywhere _near_ this case!” he protested. “I’ve got no problem with you changing your mind, but you couldn’t come up with a better way to get me here than _this?!_ ”

“Hey, settle down chief,” Jim snapped back. “I told you – this wasn’t my idea. I only went to Rainier to steal some books from the University Library. I swear, I had no idea Johnson had been sent to grab you.”

It was on the tip of Blair’s tongue to object to Jim stealing from Rainier before he realized just how crazy that was, and changed tack. “You said these guys were thieves. What the hell do they want with me?”

“I don’t know,” Jim admitted. “It’s got to have something to do with the stuff we stole from the Cascade Museum yesterday.”

“The gold from Machu Picchu that got stolen – that was you? It’s been all over the papers, the artifacts in that exhibit are worth thousands of dollars.”

“Well there was something wrong with them. Golding figured that much out before he died in the crash.”

“Crash? What crash?” Blair exclaimed, dropping his head back down onto the bed, his head reeling from trying to work out what he’d been dragged in to.

“Hey, are you alright?” Jim asked, and Blair had to choke back an immediate, almost hysterical laugh at the question. But he recognized the concern behind Jim’s eyes, and nodded seriously instead of laughing.

His ribs were still sore, and his head was pounding in more places than he wanted to count, but he could only see one of Jim, and even if it was slightly blurred, Blair was putting that down to the loss of his glasses rather than any kind of serious head injury.

Blair had a feeling that his confusion was more related to the absurdity of this entire situation than it was to any of the punches he’d taken.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he sighed. “How long do we have before those guys come back?”

Jim frowned, running one finger across his brow in a gesture that revealed he was just as worried about all this as Blair himself. “Not long,” he admitted.

“So what do we do now?”

There was an uncomfortable silence, and Blair shifted awkwardly on the bed, trying to relieve the strain on his shoulders while he waited for Jim’s answer. “We’ll have to play along for now,” Jim eventually decided. “I managed to convince Tate that I should be the one keeping an eye on you; spun him some line about playing good cop to their bad. Johnson told Tate that I stopped him from laying into you at Rainier, I think he thinks I’m some kind of mercenary or something.” Jim’s tone of voice clearly revealed his disgust at the suggestion, but then he shrugged and his expression lightened. “Still, he can think that all he likes if it keeps them away from you for the time being.”

“I suppose I should be grateful that you didn’t just hit me,” Blair muttered, and Jim looked away from him then, his jaw clenching in frustration.

“Listen,” he began, but Blair held up a hand to stop him. The gesture was as instinctive as it was pointless, his awkward position turning it into a parody of his usual body language, but Jim recognized it all the same, his mouth twitching slightly as he suppressed a tired smile. 

“No, it’s alright, Jim. It sounds like they were going to come after me anyway. At least this way I know you’re here and I’m not on my own.”

Jim smiled back at him, seemingly grateful for the reassurance. “Okay,” he announced. “I’d better bring you up to speed with everything that’s happened over the last couple of weeks.”

Blair listened as Jim skimmed over the details; his initial meeting with Tate, the bar fight, right up to the break-in at the Cascade Museum. “The break-in went like a charm,” Jim continued. “In and out. Johnson knocked out the security guard, we dealt with the alarms, and I left a message for Simon so that he’d know it was us. It was only once we’d got away from the Museum that things started to go wrong…”

 

~*~*~

 

_…The car screeched away from the sidewalk with a squeal of rubber and the roar of a stressed engine, careening round the corner at the end of the street and barely keeping its left set of tires on the ground. Hemmed in behind the driver, Jim grunted softly as inertia threw him against the car door. Tate overbalanced, slamming into Jim and crushing him in the tiny space._

_“Jesus Johnson, will you slow down?” Tate yelled once he’d regained his seat, poking Johnson viciously in the shoulder to get his attention as he fought with the wheel. “This isn’t a fucking race track!”_

_“Where’s your sense of adventure?” Johnson yelled back with a whoop of exhilarated joy, but he eased off the gas anyway, reining in the power of the engine and reluctantly bringing the car just barely back under the speed limit._

_The next few miles passed in a satisfied silence. Jim gazed thoughtfully out of the side window, trying to work out how an Incan treasure trove could possibly have anything to do with Neil Forrester and the Reclaim America Front. Jim didn’t know much about the Incans; they were the wrong side of Peru and a few thousand years too early for him to have come across them during his time with the Chopec, but Tate had mentioned that they were going out tonight to pick up the next object they’d been contracted to steal, and some careful snooping on Jim’s part had already proven that it was Forrester who’d done the hiring. He was definitely in the right gang, and it was all starting to happen, but both he and Simon had been expecting Forrester to hire Tate to steal blueprints, or explosives, perhaps even a prototype weapon of some kind – not buried treasure that was more Sandburg's area of expertise than his._

_He sighed softly, knowing that he didn’t have long to work it out. If they couldn’t connect this theft to Forrester and his group soon then there wouldn’t be proof of anything stronger than theft that they could take to the DA. Even if it was theft and aggravated assault because of the security guard they’d encountered at the museum, that wasn’t going to be enough to close down the bombers. At this rate, they’d be lucky if they managed to even nail Forrester himself with conspiracy to steal._

_With that in mind he leaned forward in his seat, leaning his head on the head rest to look over Jack Golding’s shoulder. The self-proclaimed geek of the group, Golding nevertheless bore no resemblance to the stereotype; no thick glasses or stupid clothes in sight. The guy may have a PhD in Modern Antiquities but he still possessed a body that must have a close, personal relationship with a very well-equipped gym. Thanks to the background check Simon had run for him, going briefly over the results during their last, rushed phone conversation, Jim knew that the guy was ex-army. That was one thing he had to give to Tate – the guy recruited the best. Not one of the recruits was under six foot, all well-built, and most the kind of guy you’d cross the street on a dark night to avoid._

_That’s if you saw them coming in the first place, and had the chance._

_Still, Jim had to admit, while he hoped that James Ellison didn’t come across like that except when he had to as part of his job, Jim Tanner also fit the description perfectly, and it was a role he’d been playing with gusto for the last few weeks. Nor was Ellison ashamed to admit that a small part of him had been enjoying the chance to let loose and say exactly what he thought for a change._

_Johnson drove them quickly through Cascade, and Ellison wasn’t so absorbed in his thoughts that he hadn’t noticed the car’s speed creeping up until, again, it was barely managing to stay on four wheels as it turned corners. Nevertheless he said nothing, too busy examining the trinkets that Golding was alternately balancing in his lap and examining. They all looked pretty much alike to Jim, but from the look of tightly-controlled anger on Golding’s face as he hurriedly discarded piece after piece, Jim could tell that it wasn’t the case from the expert. He tapped Golding on the shoulder._

_“Problem?” he asked, aware of Tate leaning forward next to him to listen to the conversation._

_Golding didn’t answer, instead sweeping three of the pieces into the foot well in front of him before holding up a fourth piece to the light, squinting as he turned it over in his hands._

_“Shit,” he muttered, scratching at the base of a delicate gold cup then peering at the mark he’d made for a moment before cursing again, dumping the cup down at his feet with the others. “Fuck!”_

_“What is it?” Tate asked; his face set in stone, lips drawn tightly together._

_“This stuff is fake!” Golding exclaimed, making an angry, abortive gesture with his hand. “They’re just copies. None of this crap is real!”_

_“What?” Johnson asked, turning his head to face Golding in surprise. In that instant, as he took his eyes off the road, he turned his body and took the wheel with him, and the car careened wildly over into the oncoming lane. Jim gasped as he saw what was happening, lurching forward to try and get hold of the wheel but his seatbelt did its job a little too well, hauling him back into his seat long before he could get anywhere near the wheel._

_Johnson cursed, wrestling the wheel as he tried to force the car back into the right lane but the roads were wet, slippery and the tires wouldn’t give him enough traction._

_“Steer into the skid!” Jim yelled, but it was already too late. The car continued to slide wildly out of control, throwing the occupants of the car around like rag dolls. Their only saving grace was the lack of traffic around them, but although there were no cars in the opposite lane to get in their way, the road held plenty of other dangers._

_Jim was again thrown against the side of the car, this time clipping his head hard against the corner of the window. His vision dimmed for a second, but it cleared just in time to see the streetlamp that was directly in their path as the car left the road, mounting the sidewalk and slamming headlong into it with a roar of screaming metal and shattering glass._

_All four occupants of the car were hurled violently forward in their seats, and Jim slammed into the back of the passenger seat, barely managing to turn his face enough to prevent his nose from breaking with the force of the impact._

_Wrapped around the streetlamp, the wrecked car screamed a dying protest as the engine spluttered one final time. Slumped limply in their seats, none of the people in the car were conscious enough to hear it._

_~*~*~_

_Jim couldn’t have been unconscious for long. He could still dimly make out the faint whine of the engine as he pulled himself back from the brink of oblivion. Steam was pouring from beneath the wrecked hood to mix with the low-lying mist drifting in from the harbor, and as Jim struggled to raise his head from where it was slumped on his chest, he could just make out the sounds of confused movement from somewhere to his right._

_The pain in his head tripled as he rested it gingerly on his seat, and Jim lifted a shaking hand to seek out the sharp pain on his temple. When Jim brought his fingers back into his fuzzy vision, they were wet with blood._

_Swallowing back waves of nausea, Jim took his first coherent look around him since waking up. Tate was struggling with his seat belt, blinking slowly but apparently in one piece. Johnson was still slumped over the steering column, and Jim couldn’t see anything of Golding at all._

_Miraculously, Jim couldn’t yet make out the sounds of sirens anywhere nearby, and no helpful citizens were running over to the car yelling about having called the cops or an ambulance._

_Glancing over at Tate again, the blond man chose that second to look back, and on seeing that Jim was awake, reached out and grabbed him by the arm._

_“Hey, you okay Tanner?”_

_It took Jim a few seconds to remember that he was playing Jim Tanner here, not Jim Ellison, and he nodded slowly, still dazed from the crash. “Yeah, I think so.” Then he peered through the shattered windshield at the crumpled remains of the hood – they weren’t going to be driving anywhere in a hurry, that was for sure._

_“We need to get out of here,” Tate muttered, pushing open his door and going round to help Johnson, who was just beginning to stir._

_Ellison followed suit, taking two attempts before he could force his door open, which had buckled slightly from the impact. He swung his legs round and stepped from the car, but Jim’s knees gave way before he’d even managed to stand, sending him crashing to the ground on his hands and knees._

_He hissed in pain as sharp gravel scraped along his palms, and Jim took a few seconds to pull himself together before attempting to stand again. Eventually he levered himself to his feet, bracing his aching body against the car shell and satisfied when, after a moment, he could stand without assistance._

_It was only then that he moved to the front of the car to see if Golding needed a hand, and the sight that greeted him was almost enough to bring the nausea flooding back._

_Apparently, Golding hadn’t been wearing a seat belt when the crash occurred. The impact had thrown him forward, his head smashing into and through the windshield, shards of glass slitting his throat in the process._

_Now, Golding’s body was lying half-in and half-out of the wreck, head and shoulders resting on the hood with blood congealing around the glass embedded in his neck. His eyes were open and fixed; mouth slack and filled with blood._

_“Jesus,” Johnson breathed as he, too, saw the body of his companion for the first time, and then he was scrambling frantically from the car to lie sprawled in the road, retching._

_“We have to get out of here,” Tate repeated, but his eyes were fixed on the corpse and Jim could hear the trembling in his voice. Underneath his year-round tan, the thief was several shades paler than Jim had ever seen him. “Tanner, grab the gold before the cops show up.”_

_It was on the tip of Jim’s tongue to protest leaving the scene of an accident, especially a fatal one, but after a second he thought better of it. There had been no other car involved, no-one needed urgent medical attention and Golding was already dead; blowing the operation now would accomplish nothing. So he settled for nodding mutely and reaching gingerly passed the corpse to get to the gold they’d stolen._

_As his head cleared and he stuffed the artifacts into his pack, Jim was thinking furiously. He was going to have to find a way to slip out of sight of the others for a few minutes, long enough to call Simon and let him know what had happened. Doing so quickly and without blowing his own cover was going to prove difficult._

_Jim caught a break when, just as he was putting the last of the blood-stained gold into his pack, he heard the first sounds of police sirens in the distance, coming their way. Waiting a few seconds until they’d be close enough for everyone else to hear, he shouted: “Cops!” He took a breath, about to suggest that they split up and meet back at the base later, getting them all away from the cops and giving him the chance to slip away and call Simon, but Tate saved him the trouble by shouting first._

_“Scatter!” he yelled, reaching into the car for his jacket before backing away from the wreck. “Meet back at the house in an hour!” With that he turned and bolted, never once looking behind him to make sure that the surviving members of his team were mobile enough to safely evade arrest as Johnson hurried after him._

_“So much for honor among thieves,” Jim muttered before hauling the bag over his shoulder and heading quickly away from the scene of the accident. By now the sounds of sirens were pounding through his head as the police cars drew closer to the scene, and Jim had to break into a stumbling run just to get out of sight around the corner before the first car arrived on the scene. Glancing back briefly to make sure that no-one had seen him, Jim kept moving, running flat out for a couple of blocks before slowing down to a jog now that he was safely away from the crime scene._

_The crash had taken more out of him than he’d expected, and even that brief burst of energy was enough to leave him badly out of breath and dizzy. Eventually he ducked out of sight into a darkened alley and stopped, dropping the bag onto the ground at his feet before bending over to rest his hands on his thighs, breathing hard, his eyes closed against the dizziness. Finally his heart rate slowed and, suddenly exhausted, Jim slid slowly down the wall at his back, coming to rest crouched in the corner between a brick wall and a dumpster._

_Eyes closed, Jim cast out his senses, listening intently for any sign that the police, or anyone else for that matter, were following his desperate flight from the wreck. Even if no-one had actually been a witness to the crash, the police would know instantly that three people had fled the scene, since Tate, Johnson and himself had all left their doors wide open after crawling from the car. Besides, Golding was in the passenger seat; there was no way he could have been driving from that position. Jim knew they’d be sending patrol officers to check out the surrounding area for the missing occupants, especially after seeing the splashes of blood across the back seat. Jim couldn’t afford to be found by any of them even if he was a cop himself – the wrong person seeing him being questioned by a uniformed officer would produce questions that he couldn’t answer._

_With that realization he dragged himself wearily to his feet and started walking again, wishing more than anything that he could go home to the loft, take a long, hot shower and indulge in a beer or two with Sandburg. It had been almost three weeks since he’d last seen or spoken to his friend, and for all that Sandburg had been playing it cool in the days before he went undercover, Jim knew that deep down Sandburg would be frantic with worry until he heard from Simon that Jim had checked in._

_Besides, he missed having his partner around, Jim admitted to himself with a wry grin, and maybe if Sandburg was here, they could figure out what the hell Incan gold had to do with a group of bombers, and exactly what Golding had meant when he’d exclaimed that they were fakes in those last seconds before the crash._

_~*~*~_

_Only when Jim was almost two miles away from the scene of the crash did he finally allow himself to relax, hunting out the nearest late night coffee house he could find and heading straight to the rest rooms. Ignoring curious stares from some of the other customers, he wiped away the dried blood that had trickled down the side of his face from his exertion, relieved to see that although it had bled a lot, the cut to his temple was only superficial and probably wouldn’t even need stitches. A few other grazes were examined and dismissed as unimportant, but Jim did give serious consideration to the bad gravel burns on his palms where he’d fallen from the car. A dose of some kind of alcohol to clean them out was probably a good idea, and for a wistful moment Jim was tempted to go back to the loft. He was only about fifteen minutes from the sanctuary of his home, and he knew he could use the first aid kit there._

_Having been relying solely on his own wits for the last few weeks, the idea of having somewhere to go where someone else would take care of him, even just for a few minutes, was almost enough to override his common sense. Jim knew he could explain away the fact that it would make him much later getting back to Tate and the others than the hour Tate had instructed._

_In the end, however, Jim’s saner head prevailed. This was a dangerous operation, and jeopardizing both his own life, Sandburg’s and the operation itself simply because he was tired and fed up with the whole thing simply wasn’t an option. Jim settled for running his hands under the scalding hot water from the faucet, sentinel vision reassuring him after a few minutes that there was no gravel left trapped in the wounds._

_Straightening up, Jim left the rest room and headed into the main café, ordering himself a coffee and crossing over to a booth in the far corner of the building, far enough away from the other customers that he knew he wouldn’t easily be overheard._

_Pulling out his cell phone Jim called Simon, waiting impatiently for the Captain to pick up the phone. After a while his call was finally answered, and a hoarse, sleep-filled voice answered that had Jim checking his watch in surprise, wincing when he realized just how late it was._

_“Banks.”_

_“It’s Jim,” he said simply, not addressing Simon by any name at all. It was a precaution first and foremost, so that if anyone was listening in there’d be no way they could connect Jim Tanner with the Captain of Cascade’s Major Crimes Unit. It was also Jim’s safe word. If his cover was blown or he needed to send a warning without actually saying anything that would sound suspicious to the wrong ears, all he had to do was use Simon’s first name in some part of the conversation, and it would be enough to tell the Captain that something had gone seriously wrong._

_“Jim?” Simon sounded confused, and Jim smiled in spite of himself as he imagined the Captain rolling over in bed and staring blearily at the time. “What’s wrong?”_

_“There’s been a car accident on Geary,” he continued, lowering his voice just in case. “It was us. I’m fine, but someone with me was killed.” Jim didn’t bother to use Golding’s name. The police probably already knew the name of the corpse they’d found, and the more vague he could make his side of the conversation, the safer he’d feel._

_“Shit,” Simon said succinctly, now completely awake. “Are you sure you’re alright?”_

_“Yes, I’m fine. I don’t have long. Get someone over to the Cascade Museum. It won’t be much longer now, I shouldn’t think.”_

_“Right,” Simon acknowledged. “Any news on Forrester?”_

_“He wanted something from the Museum,” Jim explained. “I have no idea why. I’ll be in touch again as soon as I do.”_

_“Thanks Jim. I’ll tell Sandburg you called.”_

_Jim smiled then, relieved that he’d still have some kind of contact with Sandburg, even if it was all going through Simon. He knew that if anything had happened to Blair, Simon would have told him. “Thanks.”_

_Ending the call feeling more centered than he had when arriving at the café, Jim gave himself an indulgent ten minutes to drain his coffee and come down from the massive adrenaline rush of the crash, then left, making his way back to the hideout he was reluctantly calling home for the time being._

 

~*~*~

 

“When I got back here Johnson and the others were already waiting,” Jim continued, winding up his story as quickly as he could. He knew it wouldn’t be long before Tate returned, expecting Sandburg to stand in for Golding even though Jim still didn’t know what Golding had meant with those last words. “I tried to find out what Golding had meant about the Incan artifacts we stole, but Tate just clammed up, wouldn’t talk about it. I had no idea he was going to pull something like this.” Jim gestured helplessly towards the cuffs round Sandburg’s wrists, and his partner managed a weak smile in acknowledgement.

“So what do we do now?” Blair asked, his voice betraying his nervousness.

“How much do you know about Machu Picchu and the Incans?” Jim asked.

“Some,” Blair admitted. “I’m no expert, man, but I’ve studied them.”

“Could you tell a real artifact from a fake?”

Sandburg thought for a minute. “I think so.”

“Good. Whatever they ask you to do, I want you to do what they say, alright? I’ll do what I can to protect you, but don’t give them any reason to hurt you. I need to find a way to slip away and call Simon, we need to warn him about what’s happened but I can’t do it from here - it’ll mean leaving you alone with them. I won’t be gone long though, okay? Just do what they tell you and you’ll be alright.”

Blair nodded silently, his face pale, and then Jim heard the sound he’d been dreading. Footsteps coming this way; two sets of them. They were out of time.

He glanced anxiously at the door and then back to Blair, frowning as he reached for the blindfold and his own balaclava. 

“They’re coming back, aren’t they,” Blair said, correctly reading the Sentinel’s expression.

“Yes,” Jim said, pulling the balaclava back over his head in one practiced, easy movement. Then he looked down at Sandburg again. “Are your cuffs too tight?” he asked, leaning over the prone man to check.

“Does it matter?” Blair asked bitterly, and Jim jerked back as if he’d been slapped. “Sandburg…” he began, but Blair shook his head to stop him.

“Sorry,” he interrupted. “Sorry, I’m just…” he broke off then, sighing once before muttering resignedly: “Let’s just get this over with.”

There was nothing that Jim could say to that and so he simply nodded, smiling what he hoped was reassurance to his partner before reapplying the blindfold. Sandburg’s heart rate automatically went up the instant the blindfold was replaced, and Jim had to fight down the instinct to take it off again. The only way Sandburg got out of this alive was if the others thought he was no threat to them, and that meant not allowing him to see any more of his surroundings than was absolutely necessary.

Stepping back away from the bed, Jim crossed over to the small, grimy window in the corner of the room and leant in what he hoped was a nonchalant manner against the wall, staring idly out of the window. Never mind that his own heart was racing almost as fast as Sandburg’s, that he felt sick and wanted nothing more than to grab his partner off the bed and make a run for it. He should have been an actor. 

At least then the bullets weren’t real.

 

~*~*~

 

Jim’s hearing tracked the footsteps as they headed down the narrow corridor outside the room he was in, listening intently for any conversation, any hint that they might have been discovered, that his cover had been blown. But neither of the people approaching was talking, and Jim couldn’t even make out who they were.

Then the door handle turned slowly, and Jim straightened slightly, turning to face the door even though he was still leaning against the wall, arms folded in front of him. He was aware of Blair also moving, turning his head towards the new sound even as his hands closed tightly around the chain that stretched between his wrists. 

Both men waited as the door opened, almost in slow motion, and then suddenly Tate was inside the room, looking grim with Johnson hovering attentively by his side.

“Time’s up, Professor,” he announced, heading quickly over to the bed without even sparing a glance for Ellison. Johnson, on the other hand, walked behind him without once taking his eyes from Ellison’s still form, and Jim frowned slightly as he detached himself from the wall and headed back to the bed to join them. Tate seemed to be willing to trust him, for now, the fact that he’d been allowed to stay alone with Sandburg was proof of that. 

Either Tate trusted him to know how to get information from people, or else he simply didn’t give a damn about the more obvious reasons safecracker with a shady past might suddenly take an interest in a good-looking college student. Jim had to assume that it was the first option, simply because if he thought for a moment that it was the second, there was no way in hell he’d leave Sandburg alone with any of these people, and that kind of attitude wouldn’t get either of them out of this mess alive.

“So,” Tate continued, looming over Sandburg’s body even though the menacing effect would be somewhat lost on the blindfolded man. “Are you going to co-operate?”

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” Sandburg replied quietly, weary resignation coloring his words.

“Just a little consultancy work, that’s all,” Tate replied, glancing approvingly up at Ellison, who returned his approval with as neutral an expression as he could manage under the circumstances.

“You’ll let me go afterwards?” Blair asked hesitantly, and Jim silently applauded his partner’s acting ability. As a civilian observer to the police department, Sandburg knew way too much of the criminal underworld and had heard too much about Tate and his people in the initial briefings to honestly believe that they’d seriously consider releasing him unharmed after this was over, but as a clueless college professor, the others would start getting suspicious if Sandburg’s own survival wasn’t the uppermost thing on his mind.

“Of course,” Tate agreed pleasantly, exuding reassuring, ‘we’re-all-friends-here-aren’t-we’ insincerity from every pore of his being. “You’ll be kept blindfolded, Professor, and we’re all wearing masks. You won’t see anything that could possibly identify us. Once you do what we ask, you’re free to go.”

 _And if you believe that,_ thought Jim, _I’ve got a bridge I can sell you for a bargain…_ Sandburg might not see any of their faces, but he’d heard their voices, heard them talking, and would be able to see around the room he was in when they started showing him the artifacts, not to mention Tate’s not-so-innocent ties to Forrester’s group. No, there was no way they’d simply let him go.

Sandburg was silent for a moment, as if thinking this over. “Okay,” he said finally, nodding. “I’ll do what you want.”

Tate grinned up at Jim before fishing a small pair of handcuff keys out of his pocket and leaning down to where Sandburg’s wrists were chained to the bed frame. He removed the handcuff from Sandburg’s left wrist, ordering him to bring his arms down before reattaching the bracelet, securing Sandburg’s hands in front of him before pulling him up off the bed and handing Blair over to Johnson. Blair stumbled slightly with the sudden movement, automatically putting out his hands as if to feel his way around, but Johnson grabbed his arms and pulled him roughly towards the door before he could touch anything.

Jim was forced to walk behind the group as they made their way out of the bedroom and back through the untidy house, Blair tripping blindly over the uneven floor and occasional steps when Johnson made no attempt to warn him of their presence.

They moved through the small, ill-equipped kitchen out into a small living room that contained little more than a battered desk and two small chairs. Jim checked the room over quickly, but apart from being run down like the rest of the house, it was all pretty nondescript. Someone had tacked a dark bed sheet over the window, blocking out the streetlight and ensuring that Sandburg wouldn’t be able to see outside the house, giving him no clue as to where he was.

Johnson shoved Sandburg roughly down into the wooden chair positioned in front of the desk, but he stayed silent, biting at his lip and moving so he was sitting upright in the chair, shoulders hunched slightly and his head lowered defensively. There was silence as the other men in the room all pulled their balaclavas over their heads, and once Tate had glanced around to make sure that everyone’s identities were safely concealed, he reached down and tore off the blindfold. 

The light in the room was harsh and Blair immediately turned his face away, reaching up instinctively with both hands to cover his eyes, squinting badly until his sight had adjusted to the sudden change. Eventually he could see again and he looked up at the other figures in the room, his expression apprehensive as his eyes flickered from one person to the other. Only when his gaze reached Jim did Sandburg show even the slightest sign of relaxing.

“What now?” he asked calmly.

“Now,” Tate replied, reaching down behind the desk and pulling out the backpack that Jim had rescued from the car wreck. “We want to know whether these artifacts are real or not.” He dumped the bag onto the desk in front of Sandburg with a thud, and Blair glanced uncertainly over at Tate before reaching forward and opening the bag, fumbling the clasp slightly. Johnson sighed impatiently but Sandburg finally got the clasp open, reaching in to pull out a small golden cup, decorated on the stem with red gemstones.

Blair examined the object as he turned it carefully in his hands, frowning at the smears of dried blood down the side. Then he brought the cup close to his face, squinting for a few seconds before sighing and placing the cup gently on the desk in front of him.

“It’s no good,” he said. “I can’t tell for sure.”

Jim tensed, glancing nervously at Johnson, whose expression was murderous as he loomed menacingly over Sandburg. “You said you were going to cooperate with us,” he warned angrily, and Jim heard Blair take a sharp breath before speaking.

“I am!” he protested. “At least, I’m trying to. But my glasses got broken when you grabbed me from Rainier, I can’t see enough without them to be sure whether it’s a fake or not.”

Jim frowned. Blair needed glasses, sure, but his vision without them wasn’t as poor as he was making out. Jim had seen Blair grade papers for hours when he’d left his glasses at Rainier, or come out on a stakeout without them, and he managed perfectly well even if he did have a headache afterwards. Why was he making this more difficult than it needed to be?

Johnson took an angry step toward Blair, who jerked back on his chair in alarm, but Tate grabbed hold of Johnson’s arm and pulled him away with a resigned sigh. “You got a spare pair, professor?” he asked, and when Sandburg nodded, Jim suddenly saw what he was trying to do. Jim getting sent out to fetch a spare pair of glasses would give him the perfect opportunity to call Simon.

The problem was, Blair had forgotten something. His spare glasses would be back at the loft, and if Jim went to get them then everything was fine. But if Tate sent someone else, or if Jim didn’t go alone, then there were photographs of Blair, with Jim, all over the loft. It would be obvious that they already knew each other, and the subterfuge would be uncovered immediately. Not to mention if one of their neighbors entered into conversation with him when someone else was in earshot.

“Are your glasses at your home?” Jim asked quickly, trying to take control of the conversation in the hope that he could somehow make sure he went to the loft alone.

“Yes.”

“Do you live alone?” Jim asked pointedly, and could see the instant that Sandburg realized the danger he’d put them both in. His body stiffened, and he glanced up at Jim in horror. 

“N-No,” he stammered. “But my room mate is out of town for a couple of days, there’ll be nobody there.”

“I’ll go get them.” Jim announced.

“Johnson can go with you,” Tate added, and Jim’s heart sank.

“No,” he said quickly, frantically trying to think of a solution. “That’s not a good idea. Someone might have seen us snatch the Professor here from Rainier and reported it. For all we know there could be cops swarming all over the place.”

“Good point,” Tate acknowledged, looking over at Jim with renewed respect. “Okay, you go on your own. But if you’re not back in an hour, I’m assuming that something’s gone wrong.”

Jim nodded before turning to Sandburg. “Where’d you live, chief?”

“852 Prospect Avenue, apartment 307. The keys are in my pocket,” Sandburg said, standing slowly from his chair as if expecting to be pushed back down. But Tate allowed him to move, and Sandburg reached awkwardly into his pocket and pulled out the familiar set of loft keys. He reached them out to Jim, who stepped forward, positioning his body smoothly in front of Tate as he took the keys. For a second as his fingers closed round the metal he was holding Sandburg’s hand as well, and he squeezed it slightly in reassurance before taking the keys and stepping away. From the lack of reaction from anyone else in the room no-one had seen anything out of the ordinary in his movements, but Sandburg’s heart rate already seemed calmer.

“I won’t be long,” he said, as much for Sandburg’s benefit as Tate’s, and he was aware of Blair sitting back down into the chair and reaching for backpack to pull out another artifact as he left the room.

He did need to call Simon and let him know what had happened, and since Sandburg wouldn’t finish examining the Incan artifacts until after Jim had returned with his glasses, Jim could be reasonably certain that nothing bad would happen to Sandburg while he was gone.

To Jim’s surprise, Johnson came out of the room with him, shutting the door quietly behind them both and leaving Tate alone with Sandburg.

“I don’t know what your deal is,” Johnson muttered to the back of Jim’s head as he began to walk away, keeping his voice low enough so that his words wouldn’t carry through to the other side of the door.

“What?” Jim asked, turning back to face Johnson and crossing his arms in front of him.

“Tate might have decided that you’re some kind of tactical genius,” Johnson hissed, stepping forward until he was almost nose to nose with Ellison. “But I don’t believe a word of it. There’s something weird about you, has been ever since we snatched the Professor. What’s your deal with him? You want his ass or something?”

“Don’t be so fucking stupid,” Jim snapped back at Johnson, angrily shoving him away into the wall. “We’ve got a job to do and right now we need him to do it, that’s all I care about. If you had any sense you’d do the same. Don’t you want to get paid?”

Johnson seemed shocked, remaining silent as Jim stalked away down the narrow hallway to the front door, his mind whirling with anger, but when Jim reached the front door and glanced behind him, Johnson was staring after him, fury etched into his face. As Jim stepped out into the night, leaving Sandburg on his own, Jim’s anger was replaced with a strong, almost tangible sense of dread.

 

~*~*~

 

Jim must have broken every speed restriction in the book as he sped to the loft, steering with one hand as he fished his cell phone out of his jacket. He dialed Simon’s number from memory, waiting impatiently for him to answer and taking a corner way too fast in the process. 

Banks’ voice came gruffly over the speaker, and Jim forced himself to slow down, hitting the brakes of the car he was using for the duration of the operation and fighting with himself to stay calm. He’d already been in one crash this week; getting himself killed wasn’t going to achieve anything.

“We’ve got a problem,” he said bluntly, “Meet me at the loft in ten minutes.”

“Jim? What? What’s going on?” Simon sounded confused and deep down Jim couldn’t really blame him. This was the second night in a row that he’d dragged the Captain out of bed at an ungodly hour, but right now Jim couldn’t bring himself to care. Johnson was turning from a pain in the ass into a serious threat, and Jim wasn’t sure he’d be able to fool them for much longer. This had to end. Now.

“Just do it, Simon!” Jim shouted into the phone, and at the sound of the code word, any protest Simon might have been about to make stopped dead. 

“Are you in immediate danger, Jim? Do I need to bring backup?” he asked seriously, and Jim could hear rustling in the background that told him Simon was already out of bed and throwing on clothes.

“No, I’m not. Ten minutes, Simon,” Jim said, snapping the phone shut and tossing it onto the passenger seat before speeding up again once he had both hands on the wheel, thanking the Gods that it was late and the roads were quiet. 

He made it to the loft in five minutes, jogging up the stairs and letting himself in with Sandburg’s keys. He detoured into Sandburg’s room and grabbed his spare glasses, shoving them into his pocket in case he forgot to get them later. Then, as a precaution, Jim quickly did a tour of the entire apartment, taking down every photograph of him he could find and shoving them into a locked cabinet in his room. It was unlikely, but Tate and Johnson now knew where Sandburg lived. He couldn’t risk one of them deciding to pay the loft a visit for some reason. Only when he was certain that there was nothing on display in the entire loft that would give away his real identity did Jim allow himself to relax. Throwing open the balcony doors and letting in the cold night air, Jim checked his watch and waited impatiently for Simon. Even though he’d told the man ten minutes, Jim knew that it could take twice as long to get to Prospect from Simon’s home, and he didn’t realistically expect Simon to show for a while.

So it was a surprise even to Jim when Simon’s car screeched to a halt outside of Jim’s building within minutes, and Jim shut the balcony doors before going to open the door for his boss. Simon stepped out of the stairwell with his gun drawn, obviously expecting trouble, casually dressed in jeans and a shirt. Jim sighed impatiently before calling the man over.

“I’m alone, Simon,” he said, but Simon only holstered his gun after he’d gone inside the loft and had checked for himself that Jim was telling the truth.

“What the hell is going on, Jim?” he demanded then, his expression furious. “I don’t appreciate all this cloak and dagger crap.”

Jim was also on his feet, pacing back and forth in front of Simon. “Tate has Sandburg,” he snapped, and Simon paled.

“What?” he exclaimed, his eyes tracking Jim’s pacing for a second before he sighed in frustration and reached out, grabbing Jim’s arm and holding him in place. “For God’s sake Jim, sit down. I’m getting dizzy just looking at you. Now what do you mean, Tate has Sandburg?”

But Jim’s own barely-controlled anger at the entire situation had finally spilled over and Jim simply shook off Simon’s hand, going immediately back to pacing the loft like a caged animal. “Exactly what I said,” he spat out. “Tate has Sandburg. I thought you said you were going to keep an eye on him!”

Simon bristled at the accusation inherent in those words. “Don’t be ridiculous – he’s a grown man. I haven’t seen Sandburg for weeks, we’re keeping in touch on the phone, but he’s perfectly capable of taking care of himself.”

“Really?” Jim challenged. “Then maybe you can explain to me why he’s currently handcuffed in the hands of a bastard like Raymond Tate?”

“Shit,” Simon cursed, stepping back away from Jim. “What the hell was the kid thinking?” he asked angrily. “We told him how dangerous this operation was, but no, he just couldn’t stay away. Has he got any idea how much shit he’s got himself into? How the hell did he even find you?”

Now it was Jim’s turn to be confused, and he stared at Simon for a moment before he realized that Simon had jumped to the wrong conclusion. Wearily Jim dropped into a nearby chair, rubbing his hands over his face in exhausted desperation. “This wasn’t Sandburg’s fault, Simon,” he said quietly. “We kidnapped him from Rainier. I should have stopped it, but I didn’t want to blow the operation.” The words sounded feeble to Jim even as he said them. Nor did he miss the way Simon started at the word ‘we’.

“What do they want Sandburg for?” Simon asked, leaning on the arm of the sofa opposite Jim. 

Jim quickly outlined everything that had happened over the last twenty-four hours; exactly what they’d stolen from the Museum, what Golding had said just before he died, right through to their fateful trip to Rainier University. “When Bell said that he knew of someone who could replace Golding and authenticate the treasure, I thought he meant another thief, or maybe a fence like Golding was. I never imagined they’d kidnap _anybody,_ and certainly not Sandburg.”

Simon nodded, his expression serious. “What do you want to do, Jim?” he asked gently, and Jim shook his head.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “What I want to do is arrest the whole lot of them and end this now, but that’s not going to get us anywhere near Forrester. I know that the break-in at the Museum was on Forrester’s orders, he’s the contact we’re meant to be meeting tomorrow night to hand over the goods, but I only heard him because of my senses, I can’t prove anything.”

“What about Sandburg? What does he think?”

“He’s scared,” Jim admitted, “but he’s holding up okay. They’ve knocked him about a bit, but nothing he needs medical attention for.”

“So what happens now?”

“Blair convinced them that he needed his spare glasses, which is what I was sent to get. After that, I guess he authenticates the merchandise and we hand it over to Forrester.”

“We can arrest Forrester then for conspiracy to steal, and as an accessory to ABH because of the security guard, but that doesn’t get us any closer to the bombings.”

“I think that’s the best we can do, Simon,” Jim replied. “I know we were hoping that Forrester would hire Tate’s crew to steal something to do with the bombings but that hasn’t happened. All we can do is arrest him and try to get some information from him during the interview.”

Simon nodded. “Best we can hope for, I guess.”

Jim checked his watch uneasily then pulled himself to his feet. “I need to get back to Sandburg. Stay by the phone, okay Captain? As soon as I find out where and when the meet is going to be, I’ll get in touch, but there might not be much time once the meet is fixed.”

“We’ll be waiting,” Simon assured him, and together the men headed back out of the loft and to their respective cars.

 

~*~*~

 

Being surrounded by men in balaclavas who would quite cheerfully hit him if he dared to put a foot wrong wasn’t exactly how Blair had been planning to spend his evening, and once Jim had left to get his glasses, the atmosphere in the room where he was being held just seemed to get worse.

Blair had come up with the only excuse he could think of to get Jim out of the building so he could call Simon, even though it meant being left alone with these guys. This wasn’t the first time he’d been kidnapped, it seemed to be happening more and more frequently in the years since he’d started working with Jim, but this was the first time that Jim had physically been there with him, and despite everything Blair was finding his presence a great source of comfort. 

On an abstract level, Blair could even understand why Jim had put the operation first; these guys had to be stopped and they weren’t going to get a better chance than this. Blair had even lobbied hard to try and get Simon to let him go undercover with Jim in the first place, which would at least have meant he’d have been on an equal footing with them instead of getting handcuffed and beaten.

In the end, Simon had become so tired of Blair’s pushing that he’d made some comment about this not being a big adventure; this was serious, dangerous police work and had Blair forgotten that he wasn’t a cop?

Blair had shut up, then, but not for the reason Simon thought. Rather than being cowed by the truth and by Simon’s blunt reminder of his non-position in Major Crimes as an observer, Blair had, in fact, had to bite his tongue not to let his anger spill over and offer a few home truths of his own. Of course he knew how dangerous police work was! He had three years’ worth of scars to prove it, including scars obtained when he’d been trying to help save Simon’s ass from that psychopath Dawson Quinn. 

Although in the early days he had been too gung-ho, swept away on the incredible adrenaline rush even though it made him cringe with embarrassment now to think back on just how naïve he’d been, things were different now. He’d changed, grown up in so many ways and lost some of that excited innocence. Somehow, no-one else seemed to have noticed, still seeing him as that geeky, excitable kid who had no clue what the real world was really like away from the safety of academia. 

And wasn’t it convenient that when Simon and Jim wanted something from him, when Blair had a skill that was required to help break the case, like driving a rig or sweet-talking an innocent college-student (or not so innocent, as it had turned out) then it was perfectly fine for the you’re-not-a-cop-civilian-observer to get into the line of fire, but when they didn’t want it, then suddenly it was back to adhering strictly to the rules?

So he’d resigned himself to sitting on the sidelines, relying on Simon’s phone calls as the only link he had to make sure that Jim was alright. Until, that is, he’d got out of his car opposite Hargrove Hall, crossing the road and heading unawares for his office before being grabbed from behind and slammed into the side of a van, the back of his head bouncing off unforgiving metal as the unexpected assault sent him to the ground.

At first he’d thought he was being mugged or something, his dazed mind hearing the shouting from somewhere above him that suggested a Good Samaritan was coming to his rescue. But that hope had been brutally shattered when he’d been pulled into a headlock and efficiently knocked out. 

Blair had no idea how Jim had done it, although his neck and shoulder felt like someone had stepped on it – a painful throbbing that blended into the other bruises he’d accrued over the past few hours.

But that wasn’t the point. What Blair was really having trouble getting past was the fact that it was Jim who’d done it. He’d even used Blair’s trust against him, knowing that if he heard Jim’s voice he would stop struggling just long enough for Jim to knock him out. Whatever Jim’s motivation, whether his actions were justified or not, that insight into Jim’s covert ops past and his ability to set aside personal feelings and single-mindedly use people’s weaknesses against them had shocked Blair to the core. Maybe he hadn’t quite lost all of his naiveté. 

Which made Blair’s seeking comfort from Jim’s presence all the more ironic because really, if one of these guys took it upon themselves to use Blair as a punching bag for some reason, was Jim really going to be able to do anything to stop it? He’d been blindfolded not deaf; Blair had clearly heard the suspicion in the other man’s voice after Jim had stepped in while Blair had been cuffed to that bed – Jim was already walking a fine line between protecting him and staying in character. Blair was only too painfully aware that if protecting him was Jim’s primary concern, this would all have been over back at Rainier.

“Come on, Professor,” one of the men spoke up, startling Blair out of his thoughts at the same time as a hand clamped down on his shoulder in an overt warning. “Are these things real or not?”

“I don’t know,” he replied, wincing as the hand tightened painfully. “I don’t!” he protested. “I can’t tell for sure without my glasses. Do you want me to make a mistake?”

Blair held his breath as he waited to see if they were going to believe his lie. The glasses really had just been an excuse to stall for time while Jim got hold of Simon; Blair had known that the artifacts were fakes as soon as he’d looked at them. 

They were good fakes, certainly; good enough to fool museum visitors kept a safe distance away from the displays by glass cases and guide ropes. But they felt wrong to touch, the sides too smooth to have been buried under the ground in Machu Picchu for thousands of years. The base of the cups was wrong as well, up inside the stem where no museum visitors would be able to see, there were definite clues that they were fakes.

Which made even less sense – how could an exhibit at the Cascade Museum be fake? At the very least, the Curator should have noticed when the exhibit was being put together, and that meant that whatever scam was being run involved some of the Museum staff at the very least.

“Your friend won’t be too long,” the kid that Jim had referred to as Johnson sneered as he leaned against the wall by the door. “You just make sure that you’ve got an answer for us soon.”

Nodding nervously, Blair started trying to figure out a way of getting some time alone with Jim. He needed to warn Jim that what they’d stolen wasn’t what it supposed to be; try to work out what that meant before telling Tate.

Then Tate pulled over another chair next to Blair’s and reached out, picking up one of the plates that Blair had pulled out of the backpack. “So tell me about this stuff, Professor,” he began. “Where did it come from?”

Surprised by the question, Blair answered hesitantly, almost expecting the question to be a trick of some kind, but Tate seemed genuinely interested and slowly Blair warmed to his subject, finding a welcome respite from the dangerous situation in the familiar surrounds of anthropology.

“These are part of a display of artifacts from Machu Picchu that were on display at the Cascade Museum,” Blair began, somewhat unnecessarily, since they knew exactly where they’d stolen them from. “The ruins of Machu Picchu are in the Urubamba province of Peru, on the eastern slopes of the Vilcanota mountain range and part of the Peruvian rainforest. The custom in Peru at the time of the Incas was to bury the bodies of the dead with all of their most prized possessions, including their women and servants, some of whom we think were buried alive. These artifacts are believed to have been the burial possessions of one of the chief’s of Machu Picchu. They were found in a tomb with the skeletons of three women and an eleven year-old girl, who was strangled by one of the priests in the belief that she would cross to the afterlife to serve her God – in this case, the chief who had died. There’s a similar exhibit on display at Rainier University,” Blair continued. _Only I helped to prepare that exhibit, and it’s real,_ he added silently. 

The sound of the door opening stopped Blair from continuing, and everyone in the room turned to see Jim returning with Blair’s spare glasses in his hand. “No problems,” he announced cheerfully. “Here you go, chief,” he said as he handed Blair his glasses.

“Thanks,” Blair muttered, putting them on with exaggerated care before reluctantly turning back to the fake Incan gold. Although he didn’t need them as such, the glasses did improve his vision, helping to ease off the headache that had been brewing since he woke up, but Blair was concerned to notice that things were still a little blurry, and as he made a show of carefully examining the artifacts, Blair found himself wondering whether one of the blows to the head he’d taken had maybe been a little too hard.

“Well?” Jim asked after a moment. “What’s the verdict?”

Blair took a deep breath before answering, all too well aware that they weren’t going to like his reply. He took off his glasses first, folding them up and placing them safely into his shirt pocket before speaking.

“They’re fake,” he admitted reluctantly. “No doubt about it.”

There was a shocked silence as the group absorbed the news and then, as if someone had flicked a switch, all hell broke loose.

 

~*~*~

 

“What the fuck?”

“No!”

“He’s lying!” This last came from Bell, who had come into the room just behind Jim, and who, Jim knew, had been looking for a chance to get even with Sandburg since he’d kicked Bell in the shins during the struggle to pin him to the bed. It came as no surprise to Jim, then, that Bell launched himself at Sandburg with fury and gleeful anger in his eyes.

Sandburg threw up his arms to protect his head. “Hey!” he yelled, “Don’t shoot the messenger, man!”

Jim schooled himself to do nothing, knowing that however much he wanted to, he couldn’t keep leaping to Sandburg’s defense without bringing the wrath of the entire group down on both of their heads. To his surprise and relief a soft warning from Tate was enough to stop Bell in his tracks, who subsided back into his place with a mutinous expression on his face.

“I don’t fucking believe this,” Johnson fumed, pacing angrily around the room before swiping the gold objects from the desk top in his anger. They clattered loudly to the floor before Johnson leaned on to the desk, pointing angrily at Sandburg. “Wait a minute,” he began. “How do we even know that this jerk is telling us the truth?” he asked. “What if he’s lying? We could blow this entire operation and find out later that we had the real stuff all along!”

“I’m telling you the truth,” Sandburg said quietly, his heart racing, but he held his own, looking back at Johnson and refusing to be cowed. 

“Golding did say they were fake before he died,” Jim commented, pleased to see Tate nodding thoughtfully to his side. But his words only attracted Johnson’s attention, and the kid whirled on Jim despite the cop having forty pounds and a good few inches of height on him. 

“What about you?” he demanded. “You’ve been entirely too friendly with the Professor here since we brought him here. How do we know you didn’t cook up some plan with him while you two were alone together?”

Jim laughed. “Don’t be such an idiot,” he sneered at Johnson. “Where does it get this kid if he pretends the stuff is fake?” he asked, as much for Tate’s benefit as Johnson’s, because Jim hadn’t missed the thoughtful, wondering glance that Tate had thrown him. Johnson’s accusation had hit a raw nerve with the thief. “It doesn’t get him out of here any faster. What does he care whether the stuff is real or not?”

“I just want to get out of here, man, that’s all,” Blair added quietly, and Jim could hear the earnest truth in his words.

“You could have convinced him to work with you in return for his freedom,” Johnson retorted stubbornly.

“Great, so we pretend the stuff is fake and then sneak off, and where does that get me?” Jim asked. “A bagful of stolen gold that everyone in Cascade will have heard of by now – the theft was all over the papers this morning,” he continued. “Where exactly am I supposed to fence it? No fence is going to agree to get involved in such a high-profile theft. As soon as I tried to sell it I’d get arrested. Or I could stay here and do what I signed up to do – we’ve got a willing buyer already. Why would I risk that, huh?”

“Doesn’t make any difference now,” Bell muttered, glancing over at Sandburg. “Not if it’s fake – we can’t sell it.”

“Can we pass it off as the real thing?” Jim asked Tate, hoping for some more information on their mysterious buyer – Neil Forrester.

“Not to these people,” Tate replied morosely. “They’re dangerous, involved in some really heavy stuff. You don’t mess with them and live to brag about it. Damn, we don’t have time to find more Incan gold from somewhere. As it is, our buyer gave us the information we needed for the Museum job. We’re meant to be meeting him tonight to hand it over.”

There was a dejected silence in the room as everyone faced the harsh facts. Jim could see any chance they had of getting to the Reclaim America Front slipping away with each passing second. Not to mention Sandburg who was rapidly outliving his usefulness to the gang of thieves. 

“Wait a minute,” Bell said slowly, and Jim felt his own hackles rise at the way he was again looking over at Sandburg. “What about him?” he asked thoughtfully. “Didn’t he say there was a similar collection of this stuff at the university?”

The alarm on Sandburg’s face as he glanced up at Bell instantly told Jim everything he needed to know. Yes, there was another collection of Incan gold at Rainier, and yes, Sandburg had obviously mentioned it at some point while he was out collecting the man’s glasses.

Shit.

Tate straightened for a second, grasping at the lifeline, but then slumped back down in his chair. “No good,” he said. “Our buyer got us all the information we needed about the Museum; codes, guard routines, where to go and what to take. We’ve got less than twelve hours before we’re meant to be handing the goods over – there isn’t time to do the research we’d need to be able to get into Rainier.”

“He can tell us what we need to know,” Bell insisted, gesturing dismissively at Sandburg, who straightened nervously in his chair. 

Tate narrowed his eyes in thought. “We’ll have to raid the University no later than eight o’clock tonight if we’re going to make our meeting. There’ll still be people on campus who’ll see us.”

Bell shrugged, reaching behind himself and pulling his gun out from the waistband of his black jeans, checking the number of clips in the magazine before flicking off the safety. “So we shoot anyone who gets in our way,” he said calmly as if he’d just suggested watching the Jags game on television, and Jim felt his own blood turn to ice at the suggestion. This was rapidly getting out of hand, and if the way Sandburg was shaking his head in alarm was anything to go by, he agreed.

“No!” Sandburg exclaimed. “You can’t do that!”

But the rest of the team simply ignored him, and Blair looked over to Jim in growing horror. The anthropology department on campus wouldn’t be heaving with people at that time of night, but there was still going to be a handful of people having late meetings, in offices, doing last minute research for papers – many of them from the Rainier faculty; namely his friends and colleagues. Surely Jim wouldn’t expect him to help get his own friends killed?

But Jim, although he met Sandburg’s glance, remained worryingly silent, and not for the first time, he wished that Jim would take off the damn balaclava. Blair had always been able to tell a lot about what Jim was thinking and feeling from his expressions, and now that he was being denied them Blair could no longer tailor his own reactions to those of the sentinel.

“No?” Bell asked softly, turning to face Sandburg again, eyebrows raised in apparent surprise that Blair was suddenly refusing to cooperate. Blair was all too aware of the gun that the man was still holding in his hand, but swallowing hard, he shook his head again. 

“No,” he said softly. “I won’t help you do that.”

Bell moved faster than Blair could have imagined, advancing on where Blair was sitting before backhanding him viciously across the face with the butt of the gun. The blow sent an explosion of jagged white light across Sandburg’s vision, the force of the impact sending him toppling backwards off the chair to end up in a heap on the floor.

The room spun out of control, pain exploding in his head and for a brief, blessed second Blair thought he was going to pass out. He reached for oblivion, aware of nothing but the pain in his head and the darkness seeping over his eyes but somehow he stayed conscious in spite of it all, barely aware that he’d instinctively thrown his hands over his head in a meager attempt at protection against the onslaught.

He’d been expecting a kick in the ribs or something as punishment for refusing to do as he was told, but instead he was dimly aware of hands clasping his forearms and roughly hauling him upright. There was a dizzying sensation of movement before his back impacted something hard and unyielding. The hands pinned him against the wall; the only thing keeping him on his feet as he looked dazedly up at the masked man holding him. It took all the strength he had just to hold his head up straight and keep himself from slumping forward into the man’s arms like a puppet that had had its strings cut, but as the pain slowly began to recede and the three, blurred figures in front of him merged back into one, Blair realized that it was Jim who was holding him.

“Hey,” Blair thought drunkenly, “we’ve been here before,” before realizing that Jim was talking.

“…do as you’re told,” Jim snapped at him, and even though Blair knew in his heart that Jim was doing everything he could to keep him safe, and that anything Jim might be forced to do to him to keep his true identity a secret and them both alive would be a million times less painful than if Jim had just stood back and left him at the mercy of Tate and the others. Jim was in an impossible position, but Blair knew that the detective would also be expecting him to play his part in this mess – doing what he was told and not giving them any excuse to turn on him. The problem was, Blair couldn’t do that. He couldn’t help these people to break into the museum knowing that it would likely mean the deaths of god knew how many of his friends and colleagues. He’d never be able to live with himself if anyone died because of him.

“No,” he whispered slowly, struggling to find the words as the room continued to spin around him. “I won’t help you kill anybody,” he said, looking blearily up at Jim and willing him to understand. “I don’t care what’s at stake,” he finished, his words spoken more to Jim than to the others in the room.

“Damn it, Sandburg,” Jim muttered, shoving him hard into the wall with a force that made Blair’s teeth rattle. Then a strong, hard arm wrapped itself around his throat, pressing lightly on his windpipe and as Blair raised shocked eyes to meet Jim’s intense, focused gaze, he wondered helplessly exactly how far Jim was prepared to go to maintain his cover.

Snatches of half-forgotten conversations at the police precinct floated back through his mind; well-intentioned warnings about Jim he’d heard from more than one cop when the news of his ride-along had been made public. The man was single-minded, they’d said; cold and unfeeling, prepared to go to any lengths to succeed on his mission, no matter what the consequences. 

But during their first proper confrontation in his office, Blair had seen something else in the Major Crimes detective. He’d seen an honorable man driven to the edge by his overwhelming senses; so desperate for help that he was prepared to cling to a lifeline thrown to him by a young, precocious graduate student that any other time, Jim Ellison wouldn’t have given the time of day.

Although in the years since Blair had seen glimpses of the unfeeling façade that Jim retreated behind when things got difficult, this was the first time that Blair could ever recall actually being afraid of his friend.

Frustrated? Yes.

Hurt? Sometimes, but never afraid.

Until now.

The hand tightened and Blair gasped reflexively, but although he could feel the pressure of Jim’s grip, oddly it wasn’t yet restricting his breathing in any way.

“No-one likes a martyr,” Jim warned, deliberately pitching his words at a level so that the men behind could clearly hear. “Did it not occur to you that if you don’t help us, we’ll just shoot our way in anyway? At least if you give us what we need there’s still a chance that we can get in and out without anyone getting shot.”

Every other word was punctuated with a squeeze to Blair’s throat, but still Jim didn’t push hard enough to truly constrict his airway, and it was only after Jim had finished speaking that Blair finally realized what Jim was trying to do. He wasn’t trying to scare him; in fact, he was specifically going out of his way _not_ to hurt him.

Jim was putting on a show for the rest of the gang – from where they were standing it must look as if Blair was being slowly strangled.

Playing along, Blair began gasping in earnest as if he was being forced to fight for every breath, and was rewarded with a tiny smile of encouragement from Jim, before the man leaned in to whisper in his ear.

“Trust me,” he breathed urgently. “No-one will get hurt.” He pulled back then, but despite Jim’s attempts at reassurance, Blair wasn’t convinced. So much could go wrong here, so much already had, and Jim could only control a tiny percentage of their fate. “Well Professor?” Jim asked, raising his voice again for the benefit of the others. “You’re an academic – what’s the logical decision for you to make here?”

That was the problem in a nutshell, Blair knew. In the end, he didn’t have any choice.

“Alright,” he finally replied, keeping his voice sounding hoarse as if Jim had really been strangling him. “Alright.” Then he grabbed hold of Jim’s wrist, trying to break the hold around his throat.

Jim capitulated, letting go of Blair who stumbled and would have fallen if Jim hadn’t immediately seen just how weak he really was, putting an arm around his waist to keep him on his feet.

“Where’s the gold at Rainier?” Jim demanded.

“Hargrove Hall,” Blair muttered wearily. “It’s kept in a vault in the basement when it’s not on display.”

“What time does the vault close?” Tate interrupted, stepping forward to stand side-by-side with Jim.

“It doesn’t,” Blair replied, dimly aware of just how heavily he was leaning on Jim for support. “It’s open twenty-four hours if you’ve got a key to the main building. There’s a security guard at the entrance to the vault – you have to sign in and have authorization to take anything out of the building.”

“It’ll be quieter after the lectures finish for the day,” Jim commented. “When’s the last class?”

“They run till six.”

“Then we should go in at eight or nine,” Jim suggested. “It should be fairly deserted by then.”

“Fine,” Tate agreed. “I’ll have to call our buyer and push the meet back an hour or two, but that shouldn’t be a problem.”

Leaning heavily against Jim, the tickle of drying blood pulling tight on the skin above his eye, Blair let the conversation drift over him unheeded. The stress of the last few days and the shock of being hurt over and over was combining to leave him exhausted and drained.

The voices circled above him like vultures as his eyes slowly closed, and Blair only came back to himself when the arm around his waist tightened and he realized he was being moved towards the door, half-walking and half being carried by Jim.

“Stay with me, chief,” Jim muttered softly, steering Blair through another doorway into a brightly-lit, white room. It was only when Blair found himself being eased down onto a porcelain seat that he realized he was in a bathroom, sitting on the lid of a toilet with Jim kneeling in front of him.

Blair took a ridiculous amount of comfort from the knowledge that Jim had finally removed the damn balaclava. “Are you alright?” Jim asked.

Keeping one arm on Blair’s shoulder for support, Jim reached out and pushed his long hair back to get a better look at the wound on the side of Blair’s head.

“Ow!” Blair flinched away when Jim examined the bloody gash with his finger, and Jim winced in sympathy.

“Sorry. He hit you pretty hard, chief. Can you see okay?”

Blair nodded. His vision wasn’t great, but the room wasn’t spinning anymore, and even though he vaguely recognized the lingering headache and nausea as signs of a possible concussion there didn’t seem much point in telling Jim. What was he going to do – take him to a hospital? Under the circumstances, that wasn’t exactly an option.

“Damn,” Jim muttered, before rising to his feet and wetting a towel under the faucet. “You could probably do with some stitches in that,” he said, pressing the towel gently against Blair’s throbbing temple before starting to clean away the streaks of blood that had dried in rivulets down his face. “But I don’t think it’s too bad.”

Blair sighed. “What are we going to do, Jim?”

“I’ll call Simon and get him to clear Hargrove Hall. We’ll replace the security guards with people from the station – it’ll be okay.”

Blair looked up at Jim in alarm. “You’re not serious? There’s no way we can let them go through with this!”

“Relax, chief,” Jim hissed, throwing a nervous glance at the closed door as Blair’s voice began to rise. “I told you I’ll call Simon. We’ll keep this under control.”

“Under control?” Blair exclaimed incredulously. “Jim, nothing about this operation has been under control since the beginning!”

“Hey,” Jim snapped back. “We have to go along with this for now if we’re going to get a shot at taking down Forrester.”

Blair shook his head, wincing as his headache doubled with the sudden movement. “Even if Forrester shows up at the meet, all you’ll be able to do is arrest him for buying stolen goods, maybe conspiracy to commit theft if you’re lucky and you can prove that Forrester hired Tate and the others. This won’t link him to the bombings. You have to stop this, Jim. It’s getting way out of hand.”

Jim sighed, putting the towel down at his feet and rubbing his forehead in frustration. “Look, I’m sorry you got dragged into this, Sandburg, I really am, but we can’t afford to drop the entire operation now. It’s gone too far for that. This is the best chance we’ve ever had to stop the bombings.”

“How?” Blair asked wearily, but at that moment Jim turned his head slightly to one side, his expression taking on that distant, yet focused quality that meant he was listening to something outside of the tiny bathroom. “What is it?”

“Tate’s gathering everyone together to plan tonight’s raid,” Jim said, pulling his balaclava back down over his head. “He’s going to come looking for me.”

Jim rose, reaching out and pulling Sandburg smoothly to his feet. “Use the john if you need to, Sandburg, and I’ll take you back to your room.”

Blair bit back a snort at the description as he did as Jim instructed, aware that he wasn’t all that steady on his feet, and that Jim was hovering nearby, apparently half-expecting Blair to take a header onto the floor at any moment.

He didn’t bother to voice any more protests. Jim’s mind was already made up, that much was clear, and Blair knew that it would be almost impossible to convince him otherwise. Even so, in spite of Jim’s reassurances, Blair was certain that this was a big mistake. There were too many variables; opportunities for things to go wrong that Jim couldn’t hope to foresee on his own. And yet, he admitted silently as Jim escorted him gently out of the bathroom and back to the room they’d taken him to when they’d first brought him in here, was that really anything new?

They seemed to battle the impossible on an almost daily basis, and so far they’d somehow always managed to come out on top. Maybe Jim really could pull this off – either way, Blair knew he had little choice in the matter, but he simply couldn’t shake his fear that, if they went through with the raid on the university, someone was going to get badly hurt.

It was quite possible that person would be him.

Jim helped him to sit back down onto the bed, pulling the tiny handcuff key out of his pocket as he did so. Resigned, Blair held out his wrists to the detective, who removed the cuffs and gave Blair a moment to massage his sore wrists before gesturing to Blair to lie back on the bed.

But the thought of being put back in that position – prone and helpless on the bed – made Blair’s stomach churn for reasons that he didn’t want to examine too closely and he shook his head, raising his arms up as a barrier between them.

“No,” he said, shifting back until he was leaning against the headboard. “Let me sit up?” he asked, inwardly wincing at the plaintive tone in his voice.

“You should be resting, Blair,” Jim replied with a frown, rattling the cuffs thoughtfully in his hand. “You’ll be more comfortable lying down.”

“I can rest like this,” Blair reassured him. He held out both hands for Jim to cuff him to the bed frame without being asked, trying to show Jim that he was okay with this, but he couldn’t quite repress the shudder that ran through him as the metal closed round his wrists once more.

It was too much to hope that Jim hadn’t noticed, and Jim placed a hand gently on Blair’s shoulder in support as Blair turned to find the most comfortable position he could manage under the circumstances. Only when the renewed pressure on his shoulders had eased slightly did Blair finally rest his head back on the wall behind him, closing his eyes with a sign and willing his lingering headache to clear even though he knew it wouldn’t.

“I need to go and call Simon to sort out tonight’s raid,” Jim said softly, and Blair didn’t need his friend to take off the mask again to recognize the concern in his voice. “I’ll lock the door behind me and take the key – no-one but me will be able to get in here while I’m gone.”

Blair nodded mutely, keeping his eyes closed. He was so damn tired – even before the events of the last few hours he’d been all but running on adrenaline anyway, his concern for the danger that Jim was in during this op translating into a stubborn bout of insomnia that had him restlessly pacing the loft and grading papers at all hours of the day and night. 

At least he didn’t have to worry about Jim anymore, Blair thought wryly. Now if his head would just stop pounding long enough to let him rest for a while.

“It’ll be okay, chief,” Jim said softly, and Blair forced his eyes open just long enough to reward his friend with a tired smile that didn’t even begin to convey his feelings.

Nodding to himself, Jim walked away and headed for the door. “I’ll call Simon,” he repeated, and the reminder of the coming assault on Rainier sent a chill down Blair’s back.

“Jim?” he called softly, causing Ellison to turn back to him. “I’m trusting you on this.”

The words were a warning, and their gazes locked somberly for a long moment before Jim turned and silently left the room.

Letting his head rest wearily back against the wall, Blair only had one thought running continuously through his head.

It was going to take a miracle to get them out of this.

 

~*~*~

 

Fifteen hours later, it seemed that the miracle Blair had been so desperately hoping for hadn’t arrived.

Jim had kept his word, and Blair had been left largely unbothered since being left in alone in the bedroom. At first he’d been too worked up to even try to rest, jumping at the slightest sound echoing from the crack under the door. Jim had said he would lock the door while he went to organize things with Simon, but somehow Blair couldn’t believe that it could possibly be that easy, and had been expecting someone to barge in on him demanding information about Rainier, Hargrove Hall and the vault where the gold was kept at any minute.

Surprisingly that hadn’t happened, and after a while his exhaustion began to override the adrenaline flooding through his body. Stubbornly Blair had stayed sitting up on the bed, determined to be prepared for anything that could happen, but after the third time he’d woken with a crick in his neck as his head dropped forward onto his chest, Blair finally admitted defeat and moved, stretching himself out onto the bed and slowly drifting off to sleep.

His sleep, though needed, wasn’t particularly restful, and Blair dozed fitfully until the key turning in the lock outside shocked him awake for the last time. He’d shot up, heart pounding and backed quickly up against the wall as Jim and a man that he recognized as Tate from the photos he’d seen in Simon’s office entered the room.

Jim slowed his pace, dropping a step behind Tate as they approached the bed. Blair glanced nervously between them, only partially mollified when Jim smiled at him and nodded encouragingly, presumably to make it clear that he’d spoken to Simon and everything was in place.

They’d dragged him out of the room without so much as a word, the entire group heading out of the house and climbing into the van that Blair recognized from the scene of his initial abduction. Blair could only follow meekly as they drove out of the quiet, suburban street and headed through the Cascade streets towards the bay and the Rainier campus.

Johnson kept a gun pushed into Blair’s side throughout the entire journey, a completely unnecessary warning given his position sandwiched tightly between Jim and Johnson. Even if he’d wanted to try and run, there was no way he’d get past either man. On the other side Jim kept a hand on his arm, intended as a comfort as much as a warning, but Blair was past the point of finding anything comforting in this entire situation.

As they pulled into the long drive that led to Hargrove Hall, pulling up next to the fountain, Johnson pushed the gun harder into Blair’s side, grabbing a handful of curls with his other hand and viciously pulling Blair’s head back to get his attention.

“Don’t try and warn anybody,” he hissed in Blair’s ear. “Or I’ll kill them and you.”

Blair’s jaw was clenched with both anger and fear, but he had just enough presence of mind to say nothing, simply nodding his agreement before pulling his head away from Johnson’s grip.

Then they stopped, and all five men got out of the van to gather in the courtyard in front of Hargrove Hall. 

Glancing around him, Blair couldn’t see any students milling around the campus – it seemed that Jim had chosen the time of the raid well. Night had fallen and Blair checked his watch, surprised to see that it was almost nine pm. He’d apparently spent the entire day drifting in and out of sleep in the bedroom.

Blair had hoped that Simon would be lurking around, hiding behind the bushes or something and waiting to take these bastards down and put an end to the madness before it had a chance to go any further, but could see no sign of anyone. He couldn’t hear anything either which sounded like the cavalry about to ride to his rescue, but surely that was a good thing? He shouldn’t be able to see anything until it happened, because if he could see it, then so could Tate and the others, and that was definitely classed as a bad thing.

He wondered, briefly, if Jim could hear them talking or knew where they were going to be, but there was no way he could ask with the others standing so close by, and Johnson was still glaring as if he was daring him to try something, just to give him an excuse to open fire. 

The guy was way too trigger happy for Blair’s liking, and in spite of Jim’s promise, he simply couldn’t see this being resolved without bloodshed. Nor did the fact that all four men had removed their balaclavas fill him with any kind of comfort. Until now he hadn’t seen any of their faces, and could delude himself with the idea that they would feel safe enough to let him go when this was all over, since he couldn’t identify them. Now that simply wasn’t the case.

Still, he thought philosophically as he was pushed into the building he’d come to think of as a second home, Chancellor Edwards had been looking for a reason to get rid of him for months now. Somehow, he had a feeling that helping a gang of thieves to break in to the university vault and steal a valuable collection of Incan treasure would probably qualify.

They moved quickly through the building, Blair and Jim heading up the small group as Blair led them towards the main staircase that led down to the basement level. Mercifully he saw no-one he knew in the corridors as they walked. In fact, Blair saw no-one at all and his heart lifted in the hope that perhaps it was a sign Simon was taking care of things after all. Meeting someone he knew was his greatest fear. Blair had seen during that brief sojourn in the bathroom that his face was a mess, and even though Jim had wiped away the blood that streaked his face, it was still pretty obvious that he’d met with the wrong end of a fist or two. 

That wasn’t anything too unusual, of course; in his time working with Jim, Blair had gathered up quite the collection of bruises and stitches, all of which seemed to have become quite the talking point in the anthropology break room. Not every PhD student regularly crossed paths with killers and drug dealers while researching for their dissertation – in a macabre kind of way, Blair had become quite the celebrity among his colleagues. 

Unfortunately, all that meant that they were all too anxious to hear the gory details when he showed up with yet another collection of bruises so that they could be the first to spread the word about what had happened to him *this* time. Blair had the impression that none of the people he was with would take kindly to standing idly by while he fended off the questions he’d be facing from the other members of staff if they saw him like this.

Jim still had one hand on Blair’s shoulder as they entered the archive room where all the artifacts were stored. Even considering the late hour there were fewer people around than was normal, and Blair’s hope soared that somehow Jim had this all under control. They turned the corner and approached the main desk where a security guard usually signed people in and out, ensuring that nothing was taken from the vault without the proper authorization. 

Blair’s eyes widened as he recognized the man seated behind the desk, looking ill-at-ease in a Rainier security uniform instead of his usual suit and tie – Rafe. Next to Rafe on the near side of the desk was Megan, casually dressed in blue jeans and a shirt. For a brief moment Blair relaxed; Simon had come through after all. But Jim and the others burst into the room like the hounds of hell, carrying Blair along in their wake, and before Blair realized what was happening, Jim pulled out his gun and fired two shots.

At close range, the force of the impact threw Rafe backwards, toppling him out of his chair to disappear out of sight behind the desk. Megan cried out in surprise as she fell, landing in a crumpled heap at the side of the desk.

Shocked, Blair froze as he stared at Megan’s body, praying that they’d fired blanks, or that Megan and Rafe had been wearing Kevlar, but before his eyes Blair saw blood begin to seep through Megan’s top.

“Megan!” Blair screamed in horror, wrenching himself violently out of Jim’s grip to scramble to his knees at Megan’s side, desperately trying to stem the flow of blood from the bullet with his hands. “Someone call an ambulance!” he yelled frantically, but his only response was a cruel snigger from one of the men behind him before a hand landed a derisory slap across the back of his head, not hard enough to hurt but then the same hand took a fistful of his hair and hauled him to his feet before shoving him across to Jim, who grabbed him by the shoulders to stop him from getting back to Megan’s side.

“Keep him under control, Tanner,” Tate snapped, “or I’ll finish him off now.”

Jim nodded grimly, pulling Blair to his side as they walked past the bodies of the two fallen cops. The last sight Blair had of Megan was as he was pushed into the small vault where the artifacts were kept. Megan hadn’t moved from where she had fallen, blood still pooling onto the floor beneath her.

 

~*~*~

 

Responding to the overt threat in Tate’s words, Jim pulled Blair into his side, placing his own body deliberately in between Sandburg and Tate just in case the man decided to make good on his warning. 

It had all gone according to plan so far.

Megan and Rafe had taken the place of the usual security detail, Jim’s bullets firing straight into the Kevlar vests that Simon had promised all of Major Crimes would be wearing. The stage blood had been a nice touch – a shock even to Jim, though the strong heartbeats that even now were racing as Rafe and Megan played possum proved that it was all faked, as well as showing just how well the plan had worked. Besides, the blood didn’t even _smell_ right, lacking the sickly sweet, cloying smell of arterial blood that Jim had unfortunately become all too familiar with in the years since joining the army.

Sandburg had acted his part to perfection, the horror in his voice disturbing even to Jim, who knew that he was only pretending. _The kid should have been an actor,_ Jim thought, making a mental note to tell him so when this was all over. Then as they entered the vault Sandburg pulled angrily away from his grip, stepping away from the relative safety of Jim’s side and the action was so unexpected that it pulled all of Jim’s attention firmly back onto his partner. He was surprised to notice that Sandburg’s heart was beating wildly, his breathing erratic, and Jim twisted his head to take a proper look at Sandburg’s face for the first time since the staged shooting. 

Tears shone brightly in Blair’s eyes even as he tried to angrily blink them away, and Jim finally noticed just how pale Sandburg was, fine trembling along arms hunched protectively in front of him proof that Sandburg was honestly upset.

 _Shit,_ Jim thought in dawning horror. _He thinks that was real!_

The realization shocked him out of his stride and he stopped dead in his tracks, staring at his partner as Blair visibly tried to keep himself under control. He stopped so suddenly that Johnson plowed straight into his back, muttering a curse as he righted himself and shoved Jim forward a step.

“Watch where you’re going,” he hissed before stepping around Jim in disgust, but the interruption to his thoughts was enough to pull Jim’s attention back to the immediate danger, and he stepped forward quickly, grabbing hold of Sandburg’s arm and yanking the anthropologist back to his side before any of the others could interfere.

Tate and the others carried on walking as Jim slowed his pace, opening up a small gap between the two groups. Praying that the gap would be enough to let him speak without being overheard, Jim leaned down and whispered hurriedly into Sandburg’s ear.

“Megan and Rafe are okay. They’re just acting.”

Sandburg glanced up at him, his breath catching in his throat for a moment before he let it all out with a deep, heartfelt sigh of relief, his eyes closing as he nodded in acknowledgement of Jim’s words. Jim placed a hand in the small of Blair’s back and guided him forward, and together the two men hurried to catch up with the others, who were waiting impatiently by the entrance to the vault. 

Tate gestured to a keypad at shoulder height on the wall to the right of the door. “I take it you know the code?” he asked Sandburg.

“Yeah, I know it,” Sandburg replied, stepping forward and angling his body to conceal the code as best he could from the rest of the group as he entered it. He might be helping them, reluctantly, to steal from Rainier, but he was obviously determined not to simply give them the code so that they could just come and go as they pleased. Jim smothered a grin at his friend’s stubbornness.

“Why does a university need a security system like this, anyway?” Johnson grumbled.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Blair muttered. “Maybe it’s because people keep breaking in.”

Then the lights on the alarm system clicked green, and Blair was shoved aside in Johnson’s rush to get into the vault. A motor whirred quietly in the background as the heavy, metal door slowly opened. A small room was revealed, barely large enough to fit the five men as they moved inside.

Deep, gray cabinets with numbered drawers lined the three interior walls from floor to ceiling. “Which drawer is the Incan gold in?”

Blair didn’t answer, instead moving towards the last row of cabinets. Johnson was standing in front of them, arms crossed as he waiting impatiently, and Blair stopped facing the younger man. “Are you going to move?” he asked, and Johnson glared for a moment before moving sullenly out of the way.

Blair knelt down and pulled open one of the drawers, lifting out a large, sealed box full of carefully wrapped artifacts. He placed it reverently on the floor before closing the drawer and standing up again. “It’s all in the box.”

Tate grinned. “Candy from a baby,” he muttered before reaching down and picking up the box. “Let’s get out of here before anybody notices those two outside.”

The small group quickly headed out of the vault, but as Jim passed Megan and Rafe, both still playing dead on the floor by the desk, he heard something.

//Jim? Jim!//

Simon’s voice.

//Jim, if you can hear me, scratch your nose.//

Jim did so, glancing round covertly and wondering where Simon was hiding. The faint echo of Simon’s laughter reached his ears. 

//I’m in the university security office, watching you through the window. We’ve got your back, Jim – we’ll keep out of sight and follow you to the meet with Forrester. See if you can find a reason to check in Megan’s purse, there’s a tracker in there that will help us to find you.//

Changing direction, Jim doubled back and knelt down by Megan’s side. Her dark curls completely covered her face, but Jim could hear her heartbeat – strong and steady if a little fast – as he opened her purse. He pulled out the money that was inside, just over $80 at a rough count, using the theft of the bills to hide the fact that he also lifted out a tiny, round transmitter that was barely the size of a nickel.

Johnson sniggered as he saw the bills in Jim’s hand. “A little petty theft, Tanner?”

Jim just shrugged philosophically, falling into step beside Sandburg and tucking the locator chip into his jacket pocket. 

Simon’s instructions were a change from what they’d agreed on the phone before the raid, and that meant Simon was getting nervous about letting this play out any longer. Not that Jim could blame him. In spite of his words to Sandburg, Jim was becoming more and more uneasy, worried that their attempts to get some real information on the terrorists could cause them to lose a lot more than they stood to gain.

The five men moved quickly out of the building and back to the van, Simon’s intervention ensuring that no-one got in their way. As the van pulled away from Rainier, Jim could feel the tension in the vehicle start to fade as they drove in silence. They had the real gold this time and they’d got away from Rainier largely undetected, even if the lack of concern from the rest of the group over the two people Jim had apparently shot was grating at the detective.

Beside him in the back of the van Sandburg seemed calm, his heartbeat going back to something approaching normal for him now that they were away from Rainier, and the immediate threat to his friends that he’d been so worried about back at the house was over.

With the tracker sitting snugly in his pocket for Simon to follow, Jim allowed himself to relax slightly for the first time since they’d abducted Sandburg from the university.

They might not get the terrorists they were looking for, but he and Sandburg might just get out of this in one piece, and Jim would make damn sure that, at the very least, they took Tate and his team down in the process.

They drove to the entrance of a large industrial estate on the outskirts of the city, and Tate pulled over to the sidewalk before stopping the engine and twisting round in the driver’s seat.

“Cuff the Professor again, will you Johnson?” he ordered. “We don’t need him trying anything stupid now we’re this close to getting paid.”

“Me? You must be joking,” Blair muttered with a sigh, but he held out his wrists to Johnson without further complaint, who took great delight in fastening the handcuffs as tightly as he could. 

Jim watched as Johnson tucked the key back into his pocket, making a mental note of where they were. Unless they could get away long enough to find something to pick the lock with, they were going to need that key before too long.

Tate was obviously keeping Sandburg alive until the meet was over, in case there was any kind of problem with the authenticity of the gold, but Jim knew all too well that the moment the money was in Tate’s hands, Blair would be the first to go.

Once Johnson was satisfied with the tightness of the handcuffs, Tate hurried them all out of the truck, handing the stolen box of gold to Bell before setting off into the heart of the warehouse district.

Jim made sure he fell into step beside Blair, one hand discreetly on Blair’s arm as he slowed their pace, making sure that they ended up at the back of the group. Jim had a bad feeling about this meeting, and wanted to make sure that they could make a quick getaway if necessary. Being out of the immediate line of fire was just an added bonus.

Tate led them briskly down past abandoned warehouses and factories that had long since closed for the day, and although Jim could hear a few people loitering around in the rundown buildings, it was dark enough that even he wasn’t able to see anybody.

Nor could he hear any sign of Simon and the rest of Major Crimes gathering in preparation for the final raid to take these bastards down, and he glanced around nervously, wondering why he wasn’t hearing the quiet roar of car engines pulling up somewhere behind them, or why Simon wasn’t talking to him to let them know that they were all in position.

Coming to a halt at one of the more well-preserved buildings, Tate knocked twice on the iron door before pushing it open and stepping inside. The others followed, Jim bringing up the rear and keeping Sandburg in front of him.

The group moved into the center of the large, empty space. The warehouse was mostly empty, but clean enough that Jim was certain it was still in regular use. Piles of wooden crates and cardboard boxes lined the edges of the room, with a few opened boxes full of shredded paper and straw lying haphazardly around the floor in the center of the room. A few moth-eaten chairs and a battered desk was the only other furniture in sight.

Focusing his hearing, Jim could just barely make out the soft tap of footsteps coming from the other end of the warehouse – two sets of footprints, and his hand tightened on Blair’s shoulder. The warning was obviously noticed, if the way that Blair’s shoulder tensed beneath his touch was any indication.

Then, out of the relative darkness of the warehouse came two figures in black suits, one carrying a briefcase and Jim had just enough time to roll his eyes at the cliché before sentinel eyes caught sight of the glint of metal in their hands. Guns.

His lower body was hidden slightly behind Sandburg, and Jim eased his gun out from his waistband, feeling the reassuring weight of it in his hand as he slowly eased off the safety. Then he stepped in front of Blair, keeping the man partially hidden from view, his gun hand out of sight behind his back.

“Raymond,” the first of the men greeted Tate, and Jim narrowed his eyes as he recognized the blonde as Neil Forrester from the photographs Simon had showed him. The second man stopped slightly behind Forrester, and Jim glanced him over briefly before dismissing him as hired muscle, though the gun in his hand definitely made him a threat. But it was obvious from the three-hundred dollar tailored suit Forrester was wearing that he was the man in charge here.

“Mr Forrester!” Tate greeted him cordially as if they were old friends, holding out his hand and approaching the terrorist but even from a few feet back Jim could make out the barely veiled disgust in Forrester’s expression.

“I didn’t appreciate the delay, Raymond,” Forrester reproached mildly, and Jim watched as Tate faltered, his hand dropping back to his sides before he gathered himself. “Technical difficulties,” he said finally, glancing briefly back at Sandburg. Forrester followed his gaze, eyebrows raising in surprise as he took in the handcuffs round Blair’s wrists, and Jim instinctively tightened his grip on his partner, biting back a curse. He hadn’t wanted Forrester to even notice Sandburg, let alone to see him as some kind of threat.

“Well, I suppose it couldn’t be helped,” Forrester said to Tate, not once taking his eyes off of Sandburg. “Do you have the merchandise?”

“Yes,” Tate announced proudly. “Incan gold, exactly as promised. Do you have the money?” Forrester nodded, and the bodyguard stepped forward, placing the briefcase he carried to one side of the desk. In return Tate gestured to Bell, who stepped forward with the box of gold they’d stolen from Rainier. He approached Forrester, but the bodyguard intercepted him, stepping in his way and taking the box before walking across to the battered wooden desk. Opening the box, he quickly began unwrapping the gold pieces as Forrester headed over to take a look.

Glancing back at Sandburg, Jim saw the barely controlled anger on Blair’s face and frowned at him, hoping that Sandburg would correctly interpret the warning to calm down. Sandburg nodded once, face still a wash of anger but, fairly certain that Sandburg wasn’t about to do something stupid like try to interfere, Jim had more important things to worry about.

He knew that Simon and the others wouldn’t be able to step in and arrest everyone until money had changed hands – they wouldn’t be able to make the charges stick otherwise, but he still should have been able to hear them gathering outside by now. 

Jim wondered briefly whether there was some kind of white noise generator around here, but he wasn’t getting the sensation of muted sound – a soft bubble of indistinct noise – that he’d learned to associate with that particular machine.

Jim just about had time to worry that perhaps Simon wasn’t in position before Forrester swore, and both he and his bodyguard swung round, angrily raising their guns and aiming them at the small group of thieves.

“What the fuck are you playing at, Tate?” Forrester snarled even as Tate and the others brought their guns up in defense at his angry tone.

Jim followed suit, aiming his gun directly at Forrester, but stepping back slightly to make sure he could easily cover any of the others with a quick change of direction.

The tension in the room tripled, and Jim sent a mental plea for Simon to burst in and arrest everybody before things could get any worse.

But there was no sign of Simon. 

“What’s the matter?” Tate protested. 

“This isn’t what I paid you to steal,” Forrester snapped murderously, sweeping the delicate artifacts to the floor in a thundering crash of metal before stalking towards Tate, seemingly unbothered by the number of guns now pointing in his direction.

“What? It-it’s Incan gold – that’s what you asked me for!”

“The gold from the Cascade Museum. That’s what I told you I wanted you to steal. This junk is not the gold from the museum – it’s worthless!”

“What are you talking about? The stuff we took from the Museum isn’t real. I had an expert look at it – it was counterfeit!”

Forrester glanced angrily in Sandburg’s direction, and Jim stared back as the man looked them both over, taking in Ellison’s protective stance in front of Tate’s ‘expert’. “I didn’t pay you to go into the antiquities business, Tate,” Forrester growled. “I told you I wanted the Incan gold, I told you there was an exhibition at the Museum and I gave you all the information you needed to get through the security system. I didn’t realize I was going to have to come and hold your hand as well! All you had to do was break in and steal it.”

“But I didn’t think…I mean, what could you possibly want with counterfeit gold?” Tate stammered, the hand holding the gun shaking as he realized just how much trouble he was in. 

“The gold is counterfeit because _I_ had it put there,” Forrester snapped. “The real gold is in the private collection of Roger Taylor, an associate of mine.”

Taylor’s name rang serious alarm bells with Ellison. Taylor was a known member of the terrorist group that he was after, and Forrester’s words gave them the first definite link between the arts dealer and the bombings since the undercover operation had begun.

The only possible reason that Jim could come up with for Forrester wanting the fake gold was to secretly swap it with Taylor’s collection somehow, and then sell the real gold for a small fortune on the black market. The kind of money it would fetch would pay for enough explosives and weapons to fund a small army, which Forrester would, presumably, then sell back to Taylor’s group for a tidy profit. It was a clever scheme – buying weapons with Taylor’s money, and then selling those same weapons back to Taylor for even more than he’d paid for them. Either way Forrester would make a fortune, and as long as no-one found out about it, he’d be home free. 

The only problem was, if Forrester was quite happy to reveal his plans to them, then he obviously wasn’t planning on keeping them alive to tell anyone.

Now would be a good time, Simon, Jim thought desperately. Then there wasn’t time for any more thoughts as he saw Forrester’s finger begin to tighten on the trigger of his handgun.

Swearing, Jim grabbed Sandburg and threw them both behind the meager cover of some of the wooden crates, firing blindly at the other men as they did so and wincing as their only protection thudded under the impact of the bullets coming in their direction.

Sandburg covered his head as the bullets continued to rain down around them. The bullets didn’t stop, but eventually they stopped firing in their direction, and Jim risked glancing up from behind the crates to try and work out what was happening. 

The floor where they’d all been standing was relatively empty; it seemed that he and Blair hadn’t been the only ones to seek shelter as soon as the shooting started. Tate hadn’t been so lucky. Forrester had been aiming directly at him when he’d pulled the trigger, and it didn’t take sentinel sight to see the neat hole in the middle of the dead man’s forehead. Everyone else had scattered – at least one was sheltering behind the now overturned desk, and conveniently placed crates and boxes scattered around the room provided enough shelter that it seemed everyone was now simply firing blind.

Ducking back behind his cover, Jim checked to see how many bullets he had left before turning to Sandburg. “Stay here,” he whispered. “I’ll try to lead them away from you, just stay down and for God’s sake stay quiet.”

For a moment Jim thought that Sandburg was going to protest being left behind, but he was unarmed and completely outnumbered, and common sense prevailed when he simply nodded.

Crouching down at the edge of the crates, Jim took a deep breath before bursting from his cover, sprinting over to stand behind a pillar about fifteen feet away. Glancing back he could see Sandburg watching him nervously and Jim sent him a quick thumbs up before sprinting again, working his way steadily towards the overturned desk where he was sure that Forrester was hiding.

Forced to only running from cover to cover, Jim had to take a strangely circuitous route to get to his target, and after a while found himself some distance away from the shooting that he could still hear going on behind him.

The sudden clang of a footstep close by – too close to be coming from any of the people still shooting at each other – stopped Jim in his tracks, and he listened intently as someone walked towards his current hiding place. Concealing himself in the shadows Jim waited patiently, and a few seconds later Bell appeared, carrying with him the briefcase that the bodyguard had been holding. 

If this had been any other mission Jim would have clearly identified himself as a member of the Cascade PD, giving the other man a chance to surrender, but Jim was hopelessly outnumbered here, and revealing his true identity would not be a good idea, particularly since it seemed that his backup was a no-show.

So he waited until Bell had passed him, then, when the man’s back was turned, Jim rose up silently from his hiding place and clubbed Bell over the back of the head with his gun. The man dropped like a stone and, more importantly he went quietly, falling back into Jim’s arms without a sound. The briefcase fell to the ground, but the soft thud as it hit the floor was easily covered by the echo of distant gunfire. 

Tucking Bell out of sight between two sets of crates, Jim briefly checking his pulse to make sure the man was only out cold before secreting the briefcase behind a nearby crate a few aisles away so that it would be safely hidden from the rest of the crooks. As he finished dragging the lid back on, he turned his attention back to the main section of the warehouse. 

What Jim heard made his heart go cold.

//Please, man//

Sandburg!

//I knew there was something funny about you…//

That was Johnson’s voice, and Jim mentally cursed as he left the safety of his cover and dashed back towards where he’d left Sandburg. Slowing as he got nearer, Jim eased up along the side of the stack of crates where Sandburg had been; praying that no-one else had seen him coming and took the opportunity to get the drop on him while all his attention was focused on his partner. 

There were two distinct heartbeats coming from the other side of the crate, and Jim burst round the crate, gun in hand, to find Johnson standing over Blair, his gun aimed directly at the anthropologist’s head.

“Drop it, Johnson,” he warned, his gun already in line with Johnson’s heart. 

“Jim!” Blair blurted out in surprise, and Johnson glanced back at Sandburg in shock before his eyes narrowed.

“Put the gun down,” Jim ordered, his aim never wavering. Unfortunately, neither did Johnson’s.

“You know each other!” Johnson exclaimed, and Jim nodded. 

“You kidnapped the wrong person,” he said bluntly, his own anger spiking at the man who had taken such delight in assaulting his friend now that Jim no longer had to pretend to be Jim Tanner. There didn’t seem much point in continuing the charade any longer.

He watched as Johnson seemed to weigh up his options, glancing nervously between Jim and Blair.

Then he apparently made his decision, because suddenly his gun was coming up, moving away from Sandburg’s head which was a good thing. Unfortunately, Johnson was taking aim at Jim instead, evidently seeing him as the bigger threat. Jim fired, his bullet embedding itself directly into Johnson’s chest, but even as the man fell, dying reflexes tightened his finger on the trigger and a second shot had Jim stumbling backwards as heat and pain shot up his arm. 

He managed to keep on his feet, barely, but his gun fell from suddenly nerveless fingers and Jim cursed, clamping one hand over the bleeding wound in his arm. 

“Jim!” Blair cried out again, scrambling to his feet and kicking Johnson’s gun away from the dead man’s hand before hurrying to Jim’s side, leading him over to the crates to sit down. “Are you alright? Let me see!”

Gritting his teeth against the pain, Jim allowed himself a moment to squeeze his eyes shut as nausea rolled around his stomach, before dialing back his sense of touch as much as he dared, relieved when the pain receded as well. Taking a deep breath, he forced himself to take his hand away from his arm, looking down at the now sluggishly bleeding wound. 

Surprisingly it wasn’t that bad, more of a deep graze than an actual bullet wound, but even so the bleeding needed to be stopped, and he awkwardly tore a ragged strip of fabric from his shirt before handing it to Sandburg, who wrapped it tightly around Jim’s arm, apologizing when Jim hissed in pain.

“Where the hell is Simon?” Sandburg asked in concern as he pulled the fabric as tightly as he dared around Jim’s arm and knotted it.

“I don’t know,” Jim admitted. “Something must have gone wrong.”

“What now?”

“Forrester and his bodyguard are the only ones left,” Jim replied, keeping his voice low in case they attracted anyone’s attention. Now that his arm was bandaged the pain was beginning to recede slightly, and Jim moved his arm cautiously, pleased to find that the pain was bearable, even if that might have as much to do with the way he’d turned the dials down than anything else. 

He reached out and picked up his gun from where it had fallen, transferring it to his other hand before moving across to Johnson’s body and searching his pockets for the handcuff keys. “Now if Simon would just arrive like he’s supposed to, we can wrap this up and go home – aha!” the exclamation came as his fingers wrapped around the tiny metal keys, and he crouched down next to Sandburg as he began to work on the locks, wincing at the angry red lines around Sandburg’s wrists where the cuffs had been too tight.

Sandburg laughed wearily. “Home? Come on, Jim, Simon’s going to take one look at the two of us and pack us both off to the hospital.”

Before Jim could answer there was a single footstep behind him, and he froze as a ring of cold metal pressed firmly against the back of his neck.

Glancing at Sandburg’s ashen face out of the corner of his eyes, Jim cursed himself for having turned the dials down so low that he hadn’t heard the people approaching until they were right on top of him.

“Lose the piece,” Forrester’s furious voice came from immediately behind him, and Jim obediently tossed the gun a few feet to his left before raising his hands up to chest height, not moving from his crouched position on the floor.

Then he was shoved, hard, and fell heavily against the crates in front of him, wincing as the impact jolted his arm. Half-expecting a bullet in the back at any moment, Jim turned slowly until his back was against the crate, and he was sprawled next to Sandburg, staring up into the barrel of the gun just a few inches from his head.

If he concentrated, Jim could see the outline of a bullet coming down the barrel of the gun itself, just waiting to burrow itself into Jim’s own body at a signal from its master and he forced himself to look up into Forrester’s face instead, knowing that if he stared too long at that faint, almost invisible outline he risked zoning. 

“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t just shoot you both,” Forrester snapped angrily, but it was Blair who answered, almost falling over his words in his rush to speak.

“We know where the gold is, man,” he protested, arms up as if to deflect the bullet that was just seconds from coming his way. “You don’t want to shoot us.”

“Where is it?” Forrester snapped, changing his aim so that the gun was pointing menacingly at Sandburg.

But Blair couldn’t answer, of course, because he’d never once been allowed to see where he’d been held prisoner for the last twenty-four hours. As Blair hesitated Jim stepped in, taking the lifeline that Blair had thrown and running with it in desperation. Simon wasn’t going to show – they were on their own.

“Come on,” he snapped disdainfully. “We’re not stupid enough to tell you that! But if you want the gold from the museum, we can get it for you.”

There was a moment of tense silence as Forrester studied them both thoughtfully before nodding once as he made his decision. “Fine. You go and get the gold,” he said to Jim before gesturing at Sandburg with the gun. “He stays with me. He’ll be my insurance to make sure you come back with my gold.”

Jim felt Sandburg stiffen beside him even as his own heart sank. He could see this degenerating until they were right back where they started; Sandburg being held hostage by a dangerous criminal while Jim danced on a hook trying to keep them both alive. Then his resolve strengthened. No way. Not again.

“No,” he said simply, and Sandburg glanced over at him in alarm as Forrester raised an amused eyebrow.

“No?” he echoed. “What makes you think you’re in any position to negotiate?”

“Because if you kill us, there’ll be no-one left who knows where the gold is,” Jim replied calmly, praying as he spoke that Bell didn’t choose this moment to wake up and make his presence felt. “Everyone else is already dead.” Then, as the fury in Forrester’s eyes deepened, Jim carried on quickly: “The original deal still stands. We provide the gold, you provide the money – but Sandburg stays with me. You can send your bodyguard along with us if you don’t trust us to come back.”

Clearly unhappy with the situation, Forrester nodded all the same, apparently wanting the gold he’d paid for more than he wanted to take his anger out on the two of them. “Fine,” he said, gesturing with the gun for them both to get to their feet. “I had my doubts about Tate anyway. If you still want the money it’s yours, but I want the gold in my hands within an hour.”

“Not a problem,” Jim said, one hand on Sandburg’s back to guide him in front of Jim, consciously keeping his own body between Sandburg and Forrester’s gun. In minutes they were in the back seat of a car with Forrester’s as-yet unnamed bodyguard, Jim directing him to the house where the gold from the Museum had been discarded.

As they drove out of the warehouse, Jim kept a watchful eye out of the window for any sign of Simon or any other member of Major Crimes – hell, the way things were going he’d have been quite pleased even to see the girl who brought the donuts round every morning, but there was nothing. Absently he fingered the locator button in his jacket pocket, wondering what the hell had gone wrong with their backup.

 

~*~*~

 

As instructed it was less than an hour before they were speeding their way back to the warehouse. It wasn’t a massive surprise to Jim that they were traveling in a black limousine with tinted windows, but this particular car had been doctored so that the rear doors couldn’t be opened from the inside, and the gun at their backs while they’d broken into the house had ensured their cooperation when they’d had any chance of getting away. 

Neither Jim nor Blair spoke on the journey back to the warehouse, the driver safely cocooned away behind the wheel where they couldn’t reach him even if they wanted to. The gold was on the front passenger seat, and Jim was afraid that, now that they’d handed over the gold, the bodyguard would simply take them somewhere secluded and shoot them both. There was no guarantee that Forrester would hold his part of the bargain and give them the money when it would be so easy to simply kill them and keep the money for himself. A man who apparently had no scruples when it came to screwing over his own people by selling them weapons and explosives bought with their money wasn’t going to waste much sleep over killing what he thought were a couple of thieves.

He decided against sharing any of his fears with Sandburg, though, who had been throwing him increasingly worried glances since they’d been ordered back into the limousine. Jim wasn’t sure whether Blair was simply scared and looking for some kind of reassurance from his friend, or whether he was worried about the blood that was even now soaking through the inadequate bandage around Jim’s arm.

So it was a surprise to Jim when the limousine seemed to be heading in the general direction of the warehouse they’d not long ago left, and he wondered if, somewhat bizarrely under the circumstances, Forrester was actually going to uphold his end of their bargain after all.

The limousine stopped, and seconds later the door on Blair’s side of the car was opened and the now familiar Beretta ushered them both out. 

“Inside.” It was the first time the bodyguard had spoken, his voice deep and gravelly as if he’d smoked one cigarette too many. Jim did as he was told with his hands raised and Blair followed suit, taking the bag of artifacts he was handed by the driver, who apparently wanted to keep both his hands free to hold his gun with.

‘All the better to shoot you with’, Jim thought, and then wondered if perhaps blood loss was making him crazy. But he hadn’t lost enough blood for that to be a problem yet, and besides, he didn’t have time to get ill, so he dismissed the notion as idiotic and carried on walking.

Then, as he was taking his final steps towards the warehouse, he heard the voice he’d been searching desperately for since the first time they’d arrived here.

//Jim? We’re here. Backup’s ready to move in as soon as you get inside. Be ready.//

Oh, thank you God. Simon’s voice was clipped; blunt the way it always was when Simon was stressed and worried, but whatever had happened before to delay their arrival, it didn’t matter as long as they were here now.

“You got any cigars, chief?” Jim asked quietly, knowing that the bodyguard could hear every word he said and hoping that Sandburg would pick up on the vague meaning behind his words.

“What?” Blair asked. “No, of course not.”

“Pity,” Jim remarked mildly. ‘Come on, Sandburg, think about it’, he thought desperately, and then, a split second later, Sandburg gasped almost silently, and Jim saw the slight smile before Blair pulled himself together again.

Satisfied that Sandburg knew Simon was here, Jim gestured for Blair to walk in front of him as they entered the building.

Forrester was waiting, sitting on the moth-eaten chair in the center of the room, the briefcase of money back by his feet.

“One bag of fake Incan gold, as requested,” Jim said before anyone else could speak, determined to keep Forrester’s attention on him instead of Sandburg until Simon could move in and put an end to this once and for all.

Standing and moving over to Sandburg, Forrester took the bag and laid the contents carefully out on the desk, smiling in satisfaction when he was certain that this was the gold he’d wanted in the first place.

“Perfect,” he muttered, and Jim tensed as the man began to place the gold back in the bag. Whatever Forrester had planned for them, it was going to happen now.

“Cascade PD!”

Simon’s voice was accompanied by a loud bang as the main warehouse doors were smashed open and Jim shoved Sandburg to one side out of the line of fire as he dived for cover, rolling as best he could with only one usable arm. He came up into a crouch, pulling his spare gun from a holster round his ankle where it had been nestled since the first day he’d gone undercover. He pointed the gun unwaveringly at Forrester as he rose painfully to his feet, aware of Simon and what looked like half the Precinct approaching from just a few feet away.

Surprisingly neither Forrester nor his bodyguard opened fire, both placing their guns carefully on the floor as ordered before raising their hands, the very models of co-operation.

Forrester smirked as he was surrounded, and Jim glanced over to where Sandburg was just climbing to his feet.

“You okay, chief?” he asked, and Sandburg nodded back with a shaky smile. “Good to see you, Captain,” Jim said to Simon as the rest of the team began to secure the area, taking note of the bodies scattered on the floor of the warehouse. Seeing that everything was finally under control, Jim allowed himself to relax, leaving the clean-up to his colleagues. “What happened to the backup, Simon?” he asked wearily.

Simon grimaced an apology. “We stayed back out of sight at Rainier so that our surveillance wouldn’t be spotted – used the locator signal to follow you, but the damn tracker stopped working - some kind of jamming signal or something. When we realized we’d lost you we scrambled patrol units everywhere we could think of – the loft, Rainier, and the place you told me Tate had been using. Just about gave us all a heart attack until you were spotted at the house. We tailed you back to the warehouse from there.”

Bell was found, still unconscious, between the piles of crates where Jim had left him and quickly whisked off in an ambulance that had been standing by before the raid.

Simon, Jim and Sandburg gathered together by the desk where the artifacts had been left, and as Simon leant down and opened Forrester’s briefcase, whistling at the amount of money he found inside, Blair reached down and picked up one of the gold goblets that Jim had stolen from the Museum. “So much trouble just for this,” he muttered, before placing the faked artifact back on the desk and glancing around for the box of real gold they’d stolen from Rainier. “Hey, Jim?” he asked. “Have you seen that box? Chancellor Edwards will have my head if that doesn’t come back in one piece.”

Glancing down at his friend, it was on the tip of Jim’s tongue to remark that Sandburg needed to forget about the gold and start worrying more about himself. Sandburg was pale, the bruises on his face and arms having fully developed in the last few hours, leaving him looking tired and drawn. Nor had Jim forgotten the head injury that Bell had dealt Sandburg not twelve hours ago. “Simon, is there another ambulance standing by anywhere? I want them to take a look at Sandburg.”

Simon raised his eyebrows. “Have you looked in the mirror lately, Jim?” he asked, amused, before one glance at Sandburg sobered him. “You both need to get checked over,” he said firmly, lifting up his radio to call for another ambulance. But a commotion from the other side of the warehouse, where Forrester and his bodyguard were kneeling, handcuffed and waiting to be ferried back to the Precinct, caught their attention before he had the chance. He broke off what he was saying, turning to seek out the source of the noise. 

In the corner of the room, where Forrester and his bodyguard were being held pending transfer to the Precinct, the bodyguard was talking rapidly to Rafe. Both men were on their knees, hands cuffed securely behind them but while Forrester’s heart-rate was surprisingly calm and steady, his bodyguard’s was racing almost off the scale.

On closer inspection Jim could see that the man was shaking and, curious, he walked over to them, Simon and Blair following behind.

Rafe was trying to calm the guy down, but for some reason the bodyguard was terrified, babbling about wanting to leave.

“Rafe, what’s going on?” Simon asked, gesturing impatiently to the kneeling man while his other hand reached into his pocket for the celebratory cigar he always treated himself to at the successful end to a difficult case. 

Throwing an annoyed glance at the bodyguard, Rafe stepped away from the prisoners and over to the Captain.

“I don’t know, sir. He just keeps raving about wanting to give a statement, but he’s insisting that he’ll only do it at the station.”

Frowning, Jim looked over and noticed that, unlike the obviously distraught bodyguard, Forrester was eerily calm. In fact, if he didn’t know better, Jim would have labeled the expression on his face as smug.

“Maybe they’re expecting someone,” Sandburg suggested, the flat tone of his voice showing that Blair quite honestly didn’t care what was wrong. Jim decided that he was going to get Sandburg to sit in the back of a squad car until the ambulance arrived – the poor kid was dead on his feet, and had been through enough for one day.

Laying a hand on Blair’s arm, the twinge in his own arm reminding him painfully that he could probably do with being checked over as well, Jim extended his hearing, searching for the sound of sirens to reassure him that the EMT’s were on their way.

Then he heard it. A quiet beeping sound – although too loud to be someone’s wrist watch even with his hearing dialed up, but definitely coming from somewhere inside the warehouse. 

“What’s that?” he muttered, heading towards the stacked crates in search of the sound. Predictably Blair followed him, Simon staying behind to try and help calm the distraught man.

“Jim? What’s wrong?” Blair asked, falling into step next to the sentinel. 

“I can hear something,” Jim said, leading his way deeper into the piles of wooden crates. 

“Like what?”

“It’s a beeping sound, a repeating pattern…I don’t know.”

“A mobile phone?” Blair suggested.

“No,” Jim rejected the idea, coming to a stop at a stack of three crates. The bottom crate was split down the middle, with barely enough of the box left intact to hold the weight of the other two, but then Jim saw that the lid of the top crate wasn’t nailed down, instead it was only resting on its base. He reached for the crate, lifting the lid as he spoke. “It’s more like a…clock…” he trailed off, his tired mind finally putting the clues together a split second too late, as he found himself staring down at what looked very much like a bomb. 

The timer was electronic, beeping softly as it counted down the seconds.

Very few seconds, as it turned out.

“Shit!” Jim said, realizing instantly that there wasn’t enough time to even begin to defuse it.

Spinning on his heels he pushed Sandburg hard in the direction of the door. “Move!” he yelled, and together they ran at full tilt towards the door. “Simon!” he yelled the instant he saw the Captain. “Bomb!” 

He watched as Simon glanced up in surprise, his confusion quickly morphing into shock as he saw Jim and Blair running out from between the stacked crates.

“Everybody out!” he yelled, and as one they all scrambled for the main doors, barely organized chaos overcoming the orderly crime scene. Jim ran full pelt, keeping one arm on Sandburg’s back to make sure he didn’t fall behind as he did so. Even though he could no longer see the digital readout, his mind supplied the missing countdown as he kept his hearing dialed up high, listening to the beeps that marked each passing second.

_10…_

_9…_

_8…_

He and Blair ran past the battered desk and he bent down, never breaking stride as he swept up the bag of discarded, counterfeit Incan gold as he went by. 

_7…_

_6…_

He watched as Simon hovered by the doors, yelling for the people who ran past him to keep going, to get as far away from the building as they could and take shelter behind cars, or other buildings; anything they could find that might possibly provide shelter from the coming explosion.

_5…_

_4…_

“Go!” Jim forced the word out through his aching lungs, gesturing for Simon to take cover as he hesitated, waiting for them both to reach the exit. After a millisecond Simon nodded and ran, throwing them a last glance as he did so.

_3…_

Jim forced his legs to go faster, Sandburg keeping pace beside him as he desperately tried to work out how long it was going to take for them both to reach the doors and if they could possibly make it in time.

_2…_

They reached the doors and Sandburg continued to run in a straight line but Jim snagged his arm and pulled him sideways, knowing that if the explosion was big enough it could send a fireball out of every available exit, incinerating anyone standing in front of the doors. But the change in direction cost them valuable time, and even as they raced for the corner of a nearby building, Jim knew they weren’t going to get clear in time.

_1…_

 

~*~*~

 

Sirens.

The repetitive sound began to pull Blair reluctantly out of his slumber and he shifted uncomfortably, wondering dimly why the ground beneath him was so hard. Even that slight movement was enough to kick-start a chorus of pain from all over his body that dragged him the rest of the way back to consciousness, cracking his eyes open to stare blearily up at the stars in the night sky.

The siren’s song was still playing, and Blair wondered if he was hearing the voices of the maidens who lured sailors to their deaths in the tale of the Odyssey, but the sound was muted; surely the sirens would have had to sing louder than that to cast a spell over their victims?

A heavy pressure on his legs caught his scattered attention and he cautiously moved his head down, groaning at the pain in his neck before a face loomed above him. But instead of the beautiful, deadly face of the Siren maidens, Blair found himself staring into the worried face of Simon Banks.

Simon was speaking but Blair couldn’t make out the words, and he finally realized that over and above the sounds of what had to be an ambulance, his ears were ringing, drowning out the sounds of movement around him.

He was too tired to concentrate on Simon, and Blair let his gaze drift idly downwards, searching for the cause of the pressure on his legs. 

It was hazy; his whole vision was blurred in fact, but even dazed, Blair could make out Jim’s form lying across him, face down, his head turned away from Sandburg.

“Jim?” he called, but had no idea whether he’d whispered or shouted the words and Simon knelt down beside him, touching Blair’s chin and forcing his attention away from his partner.

“…”

Still nothing, and though Blair would normally have tried lip-reading to work out what he was being asked, this time he couldn’t find the energy. Raising his hand slightly to signal his failure, Blair gestured towards Jim, trying to convey to Simon that he needed to be worrying more about the still unconscious detective than he did about him, Blair let his eyes drift shut again.

The world could wait.

 

~*~*~

 

The next time Blair opened his eyes the star-filled night sky had turned into a bright white ceiling, but Simon’s worried face was still hovering above him. Two of them, in fact.

He blinked once and Simon’s face slowly coalesced into the single figure that Blair knew it should be. 

“Simon?” he muttered, pleased that he could now hear his own voice at something approaching its normal volume, even if it did sound hoarse and shaky.

“Hey, Sandburg,” Simon greeted with a relieved smile. “How are you doing?”

Blair frowned, considering the question seriously. He hurt but the pain was duller now than it had been, and he looked down to see an IV snaking into the back of his hand that explained why.

The headache was particularly bad and there was a pain in his shoulder that didn’t seem to want to ease up, but all in all he felt okay. Even if it had taken longer than it should for him to work that out.

“I’m okay,” he said softly. “What happened?”

“The warehouse blew up, remember? You and Jim were the last ones to get out, you got caught in the blast.”

Blair felt his heart rate spike, a fact not lost by the heart monitor beeping incessantly behind him. “Jim? Is he okay?”

“He’s still being treated,” Simon admitted with a frown. “He hasn’t woken up yet.”

“What?!” the word was weak but heartfelt, and Blair tried to sit up, barely getting a few inches before the pain in his head got too much and he sank back to the bed in frustration. “What’s wrong with him?”

“He hit his head in the explosion,” Simon explained gently. “The doctor’s don’t think there’s any serious damage but he’s still unconscious. They’re monitoring him and they think he’ll wake up any time now.”

Blair nodded, only partially relieved by the Captain’s words but not bothering to argue. He’d been here before, he knew the drill. He’d only been awake himself for a few minutes – nothing on earth was going to get Simon to agree to him going to sit by Jim’s bedside till he woke up, no matter how much Blair might want to. Simon might never admit it openly, but on a bad day – and oh, had this been a bad day - his protective instincts where Jim and Blair were concerned often rivaled their fears for each other.

And he was way too tired to make any kind of sense out of that sentence.

Either way it all added up to one thing – Blair wasn’t going to be let out of this bed until the doctors had taken a look at him and pronounced him well on the mend. 

Blair yawned in spite of himself, acknowledging the dull ache in his jaw as he did so. 

“Was anyone else hurt?” he asked Simon, who eased his tall frame into a plastic chair before answering, leaning over to press what had to be the call button just outside of Blair’s line of vision. Yep, Blair had definitely woken up in these places once too often.

“A few bruises, that’s all. You two are the only ones in the hospital.”

“That’s good,” Blair replied. “Is there any water here, Simon?”

Simon dutifully poured him some, holding the cup gently against his lips so that Blair could drink without having to try and sit up, and in that moment, Blair had a glimpse of what a caring father Simon must be to Darryl beneath all the bluster and discipline.

“Thanks,” he said, smiling up at the Captain, but before he could say anything more a matronly woman in a nurse’s uniform bustled into the room.

“Good evening, Mr Sandburg,” she greeted cheerfully, smiling when she saw that he was awake. “How are you feeling?”

“Okay,” Blair said, deciding that the headache wasn’t bad enough to need mentioning. 

As she flashed a penlight into his eyes and asked him a series of questions to check his mental state, Blair fought back his impatience and followed her instructions to the letter. Protesting was only going to delay the time it took to get to Jim.

 

~*~*~ 

 

In the end it was well over an hour before Blair was able to convince the doctors to let him out of bed. The mild concussion he’d suspected after he’d been hit with the gun was confirmed, along with dehydration and more bruises than Blair really wanted to think about at the moment. 

All in all, he’d got off lightly, but somehow Blair couldn’t quite bring himself to see that. More than anything he was exhausted, and the simple knowledge that the ordeal was actually over was almost more than he could comprehend. The temptation to simply roll over and go back to sleep, leaving anything as complicated as his feelings for another day when he didn’t feel quite so awful called to him, trying to seduce him back to sleep, but Blair knew that, despite everything, he wouldn’t be able to completely relax until he’d seen Jim for himself. 

Surprisingly, Simon had backed him up with the doctors and eventually they’d reached a compromise – the hospital would let him visit Jim for ten minutes and in return Blair wouldn’t object to using a wheelchair to get there. He’d agreed instantly, privately acknowledging that he probably wouldn’t even get to the door of Jim’s room under his own steam. 

He’d kept that to himself though, aware that if they knew just how awful he felt they’d never let him out of bed, but the knowing frown that Simon sent his way told him that he wasn’t really fooling anyone. 

So now he was waiting for his ride; waiting alone, since Simon had gone to check on the only surviving member of Tate’s team other than Jim, who was under guard in another wing of the hospital. It was taking forever for the nurses to find him a spare wheelchair, and Blair had a feeling that they were half hoping he’d fall asleep while he was waiting, so he stubbornly propped himself up against the wall until they returned. 

There was a mirror hanging on the back of the door opposite him, and sitting up in bed, Blair got his first good look at himself since waking up in the hospital. He’d already known that he looked a mess, he’d seen that in the bathroom where Jim had patched him up before they’d left for Rainier, but in the hours since, the bruises had darkened and it looked like the explosion had added a few more for good measure, since he didn’t remember having a black eye before. 

The cut over his eye had been stitched, there were bruises on his cheek, jaw and an angry scrape across his forehead, and yet Blair’s focus was drawn most by the faint, finger shaped bruises that he could just make out around his throat. 

Jim’s fingers.

Captivated, Blair traced the marks with his hand, the motion bringing with it the vivid memory of what Jim had done to put them there. If Blair checked, he knew there would be matching bruises around his upper arms.

Somehow, even though the bruises themselves didn’t hurt, Blair knew that they were the ones he’d be seeing in the mirror long after they’d faded away from even Sentinel vision. 

Because Jim had caused them. 

Feeling the chill of the sterile room, Blair pulled the thin cover further up the bed.

That was the real problem here. Physically he was fine – this was, in fact, one of the tamer stays in hospital he’d had over the last few years. He hadn’t overdosed, he hadn’t been shot, there were no broken ribs and he’d be out of here tomorrow, but the knowledge that Jim had been responsible for putting him here bothered Blair more than any number of broken bones ever had.

The fact remained that Jim could have put a stop to this almost before it started, if he’d just warned him, or even Simon, what Tate was planning. Even if he’d ended the op and arrested Johnson at Rainier instead of actively taking part in Blair’s kidnapping it would have been something.

Sighing, Blair gingerly rested his head back against the wall, wondering what was taking the wheelchair so long. All he wanted to do was go to see Jim, then come back to bed and forget about everything until he’d had some rest.

He couldn’t quite believe that it had only been 24 hours since he was in his car on the way to Rainier, blissfully ignorant of what was about to happen.

It seemed like someone was finally on his side, because minutes later the nurse returned with Simon, and soon Blair was on his way through the corridors towards Jim’s room.

“Professor Sandburg! Professor Sandburg!” The cry startled him and he turned in the chair, seeking out the source. The kid running up to him could only have been 19 at the most, and it took Blair a moment to place him as Jake Bell, a history student who’d taken one of his classes the year before. Jake’s stumbling run came to a stop as he got closer to Blair, eyes widening in alarm as he took in the bruises.

“Oh my god!” he breathed, and Blair was just trying to summon up the energy to find a glib response to lighten the mood when Jake spoke again. “Professor, I’m so sorry. The cops told me what happened…I never imagined he’d…you must think…god I’m sorry…” he trailed off helplessly, the horror and shame in his eyes confusing Blair even more than the jumbled words.

“Jake, wait a minute, slow down,” he protested. “What are you talking about?”

“My…my brother.” Now it was Jake’s turn to look confused. “Graham’s here in the hospital. They said that he hurt you.”

Suddenly it clicked. The one surviving member of Tate’s gang was at Cascade General – Jim had called one of them Bell; Graham Bell, Jake’s older brother. Blair had heard of him before, Jake was always talking about his family, and he idolized his older sibling.

It all fit, even the way they’d insisted on calling him Professor – Jake had been calling him that since his first day in class, even though Blair had repeatedly told him that he didn’t have his doctorate yet. Jake had always just grinned and told him that ‘he was a teacher, wasn’t he?’.

Graham Bell’s connection to his brother was the reason that they’d kidnapped Sandburg in the first place.

“I never knew their names,” Blair muttered, more to himself than to the distraught student, but Jake heard him anyway and paled even further, carrying on his jumbled explanation. “Graham called me yesterday, said he’d found something buried in the ground at work – he works in a road crew – that he wanted to show to an expert. I told him to come and talk to you. I promise, Professor, I had no idea what he was going to do.”

The kid was close to tears at the thought of what his brother had done, and Blair forced himself to smile. “It’s alright, Jake. You weren’t to know. It’s not your fault. I’m not hurt, not really.”

Simon had been standing silently behind him and he bristled at that, stepping forward until Blair held up a hand to keep the Captain at bay, but even that tiny movement had caught Jake’s attention and he glanced warily up at Simon before instinctively taking a step back at the imposing man.

“I’ll be fine, Jake,” Blair repeated, trying to draw Jake’s attention back to him. “Look, Simon’s just taking me to see someone else who’s here, but I’m going to be back in my room in a while. Why don’t you come and visit me?”

Jake nodded, never taking his eyes away from Simon, and Blair wondered if Jake even realized that the guy was a cop, and wasn’t about to tear him limb from limb simply because he was related to the man who had helped to put Blair in the hospital. Nodding silently, Jake took another step backwards. “I should…you know,” he gestured vaguely back in the direction he’d come. “I’ll come and see you later, Professor,” he said softly before turning away and bolting back down the corridor almost as fast as he’d arrived.

Settling back in the chair as Simon started pushing him further down the corridor, Blair was going to chastise Simon for scaring the kid, when something that Jake had said came back to him. Graham had asked his younger brother to recommend an expert to take his ‘find’ to. That meant that his kidnapping had had nothing to do with Jim – Jim hadn’t set him up. Then Blair remembered that Jim had tried to tell him exactly that back at the house, when he’d tried to explain that he’d known nothing about the kidnapping until it had happened, but Blair had been so scared, so confused, that Jim’s words hadn’t really registered with him.

Not until now.

Finally Blair had to face the fact that a lot of this really had been out of Jim’s control – Jim hadn’t used him to advance the case at all. From the moment Jake had told his brother about the ‘expert’ at Rainier, his fate had been sealed. They were always going to kidnap him, and only Jim’s coincidental presence in the group had kept him alive. Jim had acted as a barrier between Blair and the rest of the group, and even if he’d had to knock Blair around a little himself to do that, Blair was well aware that without Jim by his side he would have been hurt much more. In fact, he’d probably be dead already.

Faced with the incontrovertible facts, Blair couldn’t sustain his bout of exhausted self-pity any longer.

Yes, Jim could have stopped the kidnapping when at Rainier, but first and foremost Jim was a sentinel, sworn to protect Cascade and all the people in it – and if that meant taking a few risks to stop hundreds of people being blown up in a bombing campaign, then surely the risks were worth it? The ‘needs of the many’ outweighed the needs of the few – that phrase didn’t only apply in the movies. Blair also knew that, if Jim had ended the operation early because of him and then Forrester’s bombs had killed people, Jim would never have forgiven himself and Blair would have felt responsible.

Deep down, Blair admitted with a small smile, it was even a bit of an ego boost that Jim had considered Blair strong enough to go along with something like this without being more of a help than a hindrance. Of course, it was much easier to think that now that the danger was over and he was relatively unscathed, but that didn’t make it any less true.

Chuckling quietly to himself, Blair straightened in his chair as Jim’s pleading voice echoed out of the door of a nearby room.

“I just want to check on my partner, make sure he’s alright.”

“I assure you, Detective Ellison, your partner is just fine.”

“Just ten minutes, please?”

“You’ve only just woken up, Detective. The doctor needs to check you haven’t sustained any form of head injury,” the nurse protested as Simon wheeled Blair through the door.

“You should never argue with the nurses, Jim. Haven’t you learned anything?” Blair asked with a tired grin as he saw Jim awake and sitting up in bed. Jim’s protests with the nurse stopped as soon as he heard Blair’s voice, and his face lit up in relief as he smiled back in return. “If you really piss them off, they have these really long needles.”

Jim settled back on the bed, the lines around his eyes revealing just how tired he was. “Are you okay, chief?” he asked seriously as Simon stopped the chair by Jim’s bedside, applied the brakes and then quietly left the room, taking the nurse with him and leaving the two men alone. 

“I’m fine,” Sandburg nodded, watching as Jim studied him intently and hoping that sentinel senses would be able to prove it to the man if he didn’t feel like he could believe the words. “Besides, I should be the one asking that question,” Blair commented unhappily on seeing the sling holding Jim’s arm close to his chest, keeping the weight of his arm off the gunshot wound. You were the one who got shot saving my life, Jim.”

Jim shifted uneasily on the bed, lines of pain around his eyes clearly displaying his discomfort. “It’s my fault you were there in the first place,” he muttered, and Blair was surprised at Jim’s admission. Not for its content – he’d suspected that Jim would be feeling guilty about everything that had happened. What surprised Blair was that Jim had given voice to his feelings so easily. Jim wasn’t the unfeeling bastard that some of the guys at the PD claimed him to be, but even so he wasn’t usually quite so free with his emotions. The painkillers he was on must have been having an effect on the Sentinel.

The strange thing was, ten minutes ago Blair knew that a large part of him would have silently agreed with Jim’s comment, though now that the danger was over and the adrenaline rush was starting to fade, Blair had no idea whether he’d actually have ever confronted Jim with it. Now, though, he just shook his head. “No it’s not,” he replied.

“Jesus Chief, they could have killed you!” Jim protested with a shudder that almost matched the chill Blair felt at hearing the words he knew were true.

“I know,” he said mildly. “Did you ever find out why Tate and the others chose me from all the people at Rainier they could have kidnapped?”

Jim shook his head. “No. I didn’t even know they were planning anything until that night at Rainier. Afterwards things were too crazy – I didn’t get a chance to ask.”

“I met someone in the corridor on my way here,” Blair continued, and had to smother a smile when Jim frowned, momentarily thrown by the apparent change in topic. “One of my students from last year, a kid called Jake Bell.” Jim stiffened at the name, but Blair carried on speaking before he could interrupt. “He was a real good student. He came from a broken home; his dad left them when he was young and their mother brought up Jake and his older brother on her own. I met his mother once, she’s a sweet woman, wouldn’t hurt a fly, you know? Jake adores her, and he absolutely idolized his older brother. Used to come and talk to me during my office hours – he’d tell me all about his brother’s job, and how he was making a life for himself, how proud they all were of him.” 

As he was talking Blair’s mood worsened slightly, his mind reminding him of how upset Jake had been in the corridor. Somehow, he didn’t think Jake was going to be as proud of his brother any more. “Anyway, Jake thought that his brother worked construction, mending roads and working on building sites – he used to boast that his brother was going to be foreman one day. Then one day, Graham goes to his younger brother and says that he’s found something that looks valuable buried in the rubble on a site. Jake’s the academic, the brother who is going to university, so Graham asks Jake if he knows anyone who’d studied the Incan history.”

Jim groaned, closing his eyes briefly before nodding his understanding. “Jake told him about you,” he finished softly.

Blair grinned wryly back at his friend. “Lucky me, huh? The point is, Jim,” he said, leaning forward and nervously picking a stray piece of cotton from the blanket over Jim’s bed, “they didn’t kidnap me because of my connection to you. Hell, I doubt they’d ever even heard of Jim Ellison. This happened because of my life, my job, and it would have happened whether I was your partner or not. The only difference is, if you hadn’t been there, you’d have had one more dead body to identify tomorrow morning.”

“Sandburg, don’t,” Jim ground out, his hands reflexively twisting into fists around the bedclothes.

“I’m serious, Jim,” Blair continued relentlessly, hating that he was upsetting Jim when the man was still confined to a hospital bed, but knowing that it needed to be said. “I’m not going to pretend that I’m deliriously happy with everything that you did, but when all’s said and done you did it to protect me. I’m not naïve enough to think that I’d have got out of there on my own. You saved my life yesterday.”

The conversation was wearing him out, and Blair could feel himself sinking back into the wheelchair, his body protesting even this small exertion when it would much rather be asleep in bed. 

After a long moment Jim nodded, but years of observing the Sentinel had taught Blair a lot, and he could see that Jim still wasn’t happy. “What?” he prompted, stifling a yawn before Jim saw it and ordered him back to bed.

“Last night at Rainier – in the vault,” Jim began uneasily. “Did you really think I’d be prepared to kill Megan and Rafe?”

Now it was Blair’s turn to look away under Jim’s suddenly intense gaze. If he was brutally honest, in that moment as the gun had gone off and his friends had fallen, Blair had thought they were dead. He’d wanted desperately to believe that Jim wouldn’t do something like that, but his own actions when he’d seen blood pooling from Megan’s body had been all too terrifyingly real. 

Looking back now with the benefit of rational hindsight, Blair knew that Jim would never shoot an unarmed innocent – not even a cop – just to maintain a role, but in that moment of sheer horror at what he was seeing, Blair was ashamed to admit he’d had his doubts.

He knew, though, that admitting those doubts to Jim would only serve to hurt his friend even more than he already had.

“No,” he said finally. “I thought maybe they were wearing Kevlar or something. When I saw the blood I guess I just panicked.” His words were close enough to the truth that Sandburg hoped they’d fool the sentinel’s in-built lie detector, assuming the man was monitoring his senses.

After a moment the tension in Jim’s face eased and he smiled. “I wasn’t expecting that either,” he offered. “I knew they were only acting, and even I was shocked for a second. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you what we’d planned.”

The door opened behind them before Blair had a chance to reply, and Simon Banks strode into the room. “Hey Jim,” he greeted cheerfully before turning to Blair. “Visiting time’s almost up, Sandburg. The nurses want you back in bed.”

“Bed?” Jim queried, the frown reappearing. “You haven’t been discharged yet?”

“No, not till tomorrow. They want to keep me in overnight for observation. Besides, I normally only get out of that because a certain person can keep an eye on me back at the loft, remember? You’re not going anywhere tonight either, Jim.”

Jim muttered an inaudible reply, his own annoyance at being admitted into hospital evident.

“No arguments, either of you,” Simon warned. “You promised them ten minutes, kid.”

“I know,” Blair acquiesced, smothering another yawn and secretly knowing that he’d be glad to get back to bed and the rest that his body was crying out for. 

“What happened at the warehouse, Simon?” Jim asked suddenly as the Captain was about to release the brakes on Blair’s wheelchair. “Did we get Forrester?”

Simon grinned. “We did. Forrester’s lawyered up, he’s not saying anything. But the driver was so shaken by the explosion that he’s spilling his guts about everything he can think of, and now we know about the counterfeit artifacts we should be able to follow the paper trail back to the rest of the group. It’s going to take some time, but we should be able to put a sizeable dent in their activities, if not take them down altogether.”

“Good,” Jim said, the last of the tension easing from his face. The room fell silent, Jim obviously fighting to keep his eyes open as he looked over at Blair. After a moment, when both Jim and Blair ended up yawning at the same time Simon chuckled and released the brakes on Blair’s chair.

“Get some rest, Jim,” he advised the detective. “I’ll tuck Sandburg into bed and make sure he does the same.”

“Night Jim,” Blair added, casting one last, fond glance at his partner before Simon began wheeling him towards the door. The Sentinel was already asleep, and Blair sank back into the chair, fighting himself to try and stay awake at least until he was back in his own room. Tomorrow he’d sort out getting himself discharged from the hospital, but tonight he needed sleep, and wasn’t going any further than the hospital room just down the corridor.

He was fine, Jim was fine, and Cascade was safe. 

It was all in a day’s work for the modern sentinel and his partner.


End file.
